Municipally owned companies and sustainability transitions: Examining municipal parking companies’ roles in governing urban mobility transitions

• Municipal parking companies play multiple roles to nurture shared mobility. • Municipal parking companies act passively toward destabilizing urban automobility. • A mix of political and market logics enables experimentation but demotes divestment. • Municipally owned companies extend municipalities’ transformative capacity by doing . • Reducing divestment risks is needed to enlarge their roles in destabilization. Municipally owned companies are increasingly being used to deliver public services in Western Europe. Yet, their roles in governing sustainability transitions remain understudied. This paper therefore investigates the roles and interventions of three Swedish municipal parking companies in realizing municipal goals of replacing urban car traffic with shared and active mobility. The analysis, based on thematic coding of policy documents and interviews with executives and strategists, shows that the municipal parking companies play several complementary roles in stimulating and accelerating shared and active mobility niches, but act more passively and indirectly with respect to other intervention points, such as destabilizing urban automobility regimes. It also illustrates how institutional conditions influence the companies’ roles by shaping their actual, perceived, and considered action spaces. The combination of political and market logics that characterizes municipally owned companies enables niche experimentation that would likely be difficult for both municipal administrations and privately owned companies to pursue. However, this combination of logics also makes it challenging for them to divest from prevalent regimes if the available niches cannot offer sufficiently large and reliable short-term profits. We conclude that municipally owned companies can extend municipalities’ governance capabilities, and thus their transformative capacities, especially by performing hands-on, operational activities such as leading experiments. Municipalities must, however, implement measures to decrease financial regime divestment risks for municipally owned companies if they are to substantially contribute to destabilizing prevailing regimes.