Enhancing land use and transport integration: towards a new infrastructure governance framework

While land use and transport integration (LUTI) is widely recognised for its pivotal role in sustainable urban development, governance approaches often struggle to address its complex, dynamic and context-specific barriers. Existing LUTI literature is largely focused on planning and modelling that offer very limited insights into these governance issues to shape effective implementation. This study develops an infrastructure governance (IG) framework to address diverse LUTI barriers across the multiple phases and contexts of infrastructure development. The methodology combines a systematic literature review with the development and validation of a conceptual framework. The review links LUTI barriers to specific IG attributes by assessing 156 articles following the PRISMA guidelines and using descriptive and thematic analyses in NVivo 14. The review identified six major types of barriers across the strategic, managerial, and operational phases and four major governance contexts, such as policy, institutional, political, and economic contexts. It also uncovered eight IG attributes under flexibility, mediation and adaptability tiers that can address these barriers across these phases and contexts. The findings suggest that such a boundary-responsive IG framework can align priorities, foster common ground among actors and sectors and enhance adaptability to diverse contexts to address LUTI complexity and uncertainty. In conclusion, this study advances LUTI scholarship by providing a nuanced understanding of its uneven and context-sensitive barriers. It offers a boundary-responsive conceptualisation of IG for both decision-makers and executors to effectively address complexity and uncertainty around integrated development. The study also calls for future empirical research to refine and apply the proposed framework in practice.