Moving meaning? Translation of sustainability norms in EU urban mobility governance

A sustainable transition of the mobility and transport sector is imperative to address the global chal-lenge of climate change, especially given the sector's substantial and procedural inertia in that re-gard. Therefore, supranational efforts to address climate change, such as the EU's Green Deal initia-tive, are trying to access the puzzle of transforming transport and mobility (among other sectors). Therefore, coming from an International Relations (IR) norm-theoretical perspective, my PhD pro-ject asks how global sustainability norms are implemented in sectoral policymaking and govern-ance. Norms, in that regard, are understood as vehicles that transport ‘meaning-in-use' across po-litical and social realms where it is translated into discourse and practice. Understood as such, the notion of norm translation covers implementation dynamics on a vertical (between political levels) and a horizontal (between sectoral/technical operationalizations) dimension. EU transport and mobility governance provides an interesting case to illustrate these complex dynamics in an inte-grated way. On the one hand side, the complexity of the EU multilevel governance system consti-tutes a challenging context for norm translation since multiple horizontal and vertical circles of translation need to be perceived in conjunction. Also, the governance of transport and mobility is amenable to a high relevance of technological regulation and emerging structures and practices, which further stimulate the need for an interactive translation process. Many initiatives and programs (top-down and bottom-up) in mobility and transport underline this impression and provide a rich field for investigation. In the PhD project, I aim to deconstruct and evaluate these dynamics through a qualitative-interpretative analysis that combines different methods such as document analysis, expert/stakeholder interviews, participating observation on the EU level and selected local translation contexts. As a result, I want to show structural and discursive contingencies of norm dynamics in EU governance and provide orientation on how to amend these architectures to enable substantive sustainable change.