Sustainable Development and Morphological Analysis: A Multi-Level Strategic Planning for the Transport Sector

Abstract

Societies are facing complex challenges, which may impede a harmonious transition to future patterns in various fields. The strategic response must reconfigure society in such a way that the provision of critical resources and the resilience of the socio-technical systems are assured in the long-term. The implementation of a new dominant technology and paradigm in the transport context is a complex process. This complexity is multidimensional and requires seamless integration of a great number of features, which entail trade-offs in the decision-making process. In this paper, General Morphological Analysis (GMA) is used as a theoretical framework to help to achieve a schematic perspective of the transition management of transport to a new powertrain technology. This is presented as an illustration of a broader representation of all the possible solutions of a large-scale problem as it is the case of any multi-level process of governance leading to the pursuit of new paradigms. The original contribution of the paper lies on the fact that there is no application of GMA to address sustainable challenges in the transport sector using simultaneously the same framework at different levels of a system, in a multi-level perspective. The analysis of sustainable decisions requires the consideration of institutions (its political dimension) at different scales, in an interactive and integrated way.