Videoconferencing: Miracle Tool or Policy Trap in the Governance of Smart and Sustainable Mobility?

During 2020, the French government imposed three lockdowns. As national regulations for smart and sustainable mobility had to be implemented very rapidly, public managers converted a significant proportion of face-to-face meetings with local authorities into virtual meetings. For this study, 34 direct and 65 remote meetings were observed, and the 15 public managers leading these sessions were interviewed. After establishing a generic script of collaborative practices and identifying the modifications made in the conversion to a videoconference format, the chapter proposes an analysis that addresses how public managers assess the benefits and limitations of videoconferencing. The main findings are that content and interactions change considerably in videoconference meetings compared with real-world meetings. And, that informational tasks are easy to deliver, but collaboration between local politicians and technocrats is much harder to achieve. Nevertheless, and somewhat paradoxically, there is strong support for videoconferencing among public managers. Consequently, as videoconferencing tends to be seen as the new normal in planning, this chapter explores the way public managers balance the positive affordances of videoconferencing (productivity, accountability, and better working conditions) with the more negative impacts of remote meetings in terms of collaborative governance.