The fitness-for-purpose assessment of strategic transport research in support of European transport policy: From a division between research and policy making to-wards an integrated innovation activity?

Extensive research has been conducted in the European Union to develop appropriate indicators and policy assessment tools for practitioners and policy makers to meet the needs of EU transport policy, and make it operational. However, to be accepted and effectively applied by practitioners and decision-makers, the capabilities of tools need to be checked against factors like scientific consistency and transparency, but very importantly also against acceptability and appropriateness in terms of the needs of their final users in policy development and policy making. That is to say, the “fitness-for-purpose” of the tools needs to be assessed. The aim of this paper is to show that notions of Policy Networking and Analysis, applied to transport research and policy development, can provide tools for such checking. TRANSFORUM project within the European 6th Research Framework Programme has performed a scientific as well as policy assessment of strategic transport policy assessment tools and methodologies developed and used within the recent European Research Framework Programmes. Transforum project consortium has carried out the scientific validation of project results, but even more importantly, Transforum has facilitated networking and dialog among researchers, policy-makers and stakeholders, by establishing a Scientific Forum, which has acted as an assessor of the usability of results in the field of strategic transport research. Policy analysis has been used as a tool to support the content and the process of networking. The conceptual framework of policy analysis has made it possible to link policy issues to research and find a common language on basic concepts between stakeholders, thus contributing to mutual understanding and communication. The four Scientific Forum meetings have facilitated a consensus-based assessment and validation of intermediate and final results of transport research in support of European Transport Policy, and of results from national research, thus highlighting those results, which could be more valuable for those designing transport policies at the European and national levels. First, the paper presents the fitness-for-purpose assessment approach in the contexts of Policy Networking and Analysis, as developed by the Transforum project. Secondly, it shows the contribution recent European transport policy assessment projects have had, for the EU transport policy issues such as the development of Sustainable Transport System in Europe. Thirdly, conclusions are made on the potential of the fitness-for-purpose assessment approach of Transforum project as a methodology for science-policy collaboration in the transport sector. Finally, recommendations for the future development of the policy networking and analysis approach, i.e. how to ensure further compatibility and convergence between knowledge and methods developed by European research and used in transport policy process at European and national level are presented.