This paper presentation is a part of GLD's Work-in-Progress Workshop, 2025 Spring Series.
Costa Rica and Chile share several similitudes; both are middle-income countries with annual GDP per capita and literacy rate levels well above the Latin American average, but they also differ in the progressiveness of their environmental and social policymaking. Costa Rica is known as a worldwide environmental leader, while Chile has been described as the epitome of neoliberalism in Latin America. Still, a public transportation reform, which addressed environmental and public health problems, was implemented in Santiago, Chile’s capital city, but failed to occur in Costa Rica’s Greater Metropolitan Area (GAM). How come the regional climate leader, Costa Rica, failed to carry out this reform while Chile, the environmental and social
laggard, succeeded? Relying on cross-case comparison, analyzing secondary data and official and non-official documents, and based on interviews with key mobility stakeholders in the GAM and Santiago, while also using the case of Bogotá’s bus reform as example, this paper uncovers the role of urgency and institutional capacity, in the presence of a vested organized group such as bus operators, in the occurrence of policy reform and its timing of adoption. In the GAM, bus reforms have been in the national plans since the 1990s, with intentional but failed attempts at implementation in 2014 and 2018. Policymakers could not shield the policy from bus operators’ interests, who managed to sustain the status quo by relying on the weak and fragmented institutions and regulatory agencies developed, which they captured.
Although transportation has become the main source of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, the problem has become evident until the past decade. In Santiago, by contrast, there was an urgency to tackle the environmental and public health problems associated with public transportation. The constitutional powers granted to the Executive allowed the national executive to block bus operators’ interests, skip Congress approval, and subsidize public transportation, enabling a bus reform that otherwise would have taken longer because of opposition, as it has happened in Bogotá. The findings illuminate, however, the implications, both for users and operators, of rapid bus reforms rooted in policymaking insulation.
This paper contributes to the scholarly work on transportation by bringing political perspectives to a sector historically dominated by the Economics and Engineering disciplines.
The GLD Work-in-Progress Workshop is designed to help scholars with ongoing papers or projects by providing feedback, suggestions, and advice during a one-hour-long workshop. And all participants are, of course, encouraged to attend several workshops to reciprocate the helpful feedback.
