Road Safety Coordination Between Government and Community: Analysis and Insights From Selected OECD Countries

Abstract

The disparity in road safety performance around the world has led to calls for the best performing nations to share their road traffic injury prevention practices. To this end, the present paper investigates the nature of the government-community road traffic trauma prevention coordination processes in Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Once ethnographic interviews were conducted with twenty-two highly experienced Administrators, Managers, Recreation Officers and other Professionals in Road Safety, this study employed content analysis (open coding, data queries, constructs/metaphors, theme association and reciprocal translation synthesis) to unveil workflows and critical success factors shaping the coordination nature of government-community road safety programs. The results revealed that community group coordination tends to be circular with engagement across and between various levels of expertise in a collegial manner. Despite the wide range of workflows in the government-community trauma prevention activities, there did not seem to exist discrepancies based on cultural or political diversity across the countries. In fact, there appeared to exist at least two common approaches i.e., the use of data and the existence of a mandate to coordinate. The factors shaping coordination in this type of local level partnerships (government-community) were just as varied as the workflows. Most importantly, this study unveiled commonalities across critical factors moderating and conditioning the type of coordination studied in this research project. These were as follows: focus on coordination-enhancing action, resilient cooperation, sharing time together, partner’s job clarity, willingness to resolve conflicts, binding agreements and unified approach.