Journal of Cleaner Production 197 (2018) 356e365

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Journal of Cleaner Production

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Challenges of collaborative governance in the sharing economy: The

case of free-floating bike sharing in Shanghai
Yuge Ma a, Jing Lan b, *, Thomas Thornton a, Diana Mangalagiu a, c, Dajian Zhu b
a
Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, UK
b
School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, China
c
NEOMA Business School, 76130 Mont-Saint-Aignan, France

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Most sharing mobility business models promise green and affordable transport in cities. However, their
Received 1 December 2017 rapid scale-up processes have often caused significant disruption and stresses to urban governance. Free-
Received in revised form floating bike sharing (FFBS) is highly-touted in Shanghai as a means to bring biking habits back to an
16 March 2018
overly car-congested city. Despite substantially changing the behaviour of Shanghai citizens to adopt
Accepted 19 June 2018
Available online 21 June 2018
shared bikes within a short period of time (2016e2017), the FFBS has hit a threshold of oversupply,
under-distribution and user misbehaviour problems, which endanger the environmental and social
sustainability of innovative urban mobility schemes. In this paper, we focus on the FFBS case study and
Keywords:
Collaborative governance
examine how commercial, political and social actors interact in addressing the emerging public problems
Sustainability in the FFBS scale-up process from a collaborative governance perspective. We find that the lack of
Urban recognition and integration of new social actors, such as user groups, as agents in the scheme are key
Sharing economy obstacles to a fully-functioning government-business-society collaborative regime. We argue that this
Free-floating bike sharing hindrance is a function of the existing socio-economic relations within the city. Our results suggest that
the city's government needs to be more agile to accommodate, nurture and integrate emerging social
actors as governance partners in the sharing economy, in order to ensure its efficacy, resilience and
sustainability. We propose an alternative governance model to improve the effectiveness of the collab-
orative governance regime towards urban sustainability through engaging the society in better and
smarter ways in the sharing economy.
© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Sharing is a foundational currency of social capital (Putnam,
1993) and among the oldest values and means of exchange in hu-
man society (Belk, 2010, 2014). Digital technologies and commer-
cial capital have enabled the sharing economy to mediate sharing in
new and enhanced ways through digital platforms (Sundararajan,
2016; Ritzer, 2015). As the sharing economy develops and scales
up in more cities and crucial urban sectors (i.e., transport, housing,
food), the level and complexity of tensions between sharing prac-
tices, current socio-economic systems and urban infrastructures
increase. While the overall impact of the sharing economy in urban
systems is still evolving, city governments have welcomed it as an
injection of external investment and capacity into critical services,
* Corresponding author. Tel.: 086 18101912837.
E-mail address: pooher2222@163.com (J. Lan).
but have to a large extent failed to recognise and address the
negative effects spawned by it (Davidson and Infranca, 2015).
Due to rapid urbanisation and high material consumption, cities
have huge impacts on global greenhouse gas emissions (Kennedy
et al., 2015). The recent rise of the internet-based sharing econ-
omy has triggered transformative changes in living patterns in
modern cities. Particularly, the sharing mobility sector, aligned with
the government strategies of clean and smart cities, promises an
eco-friendlier, more accessible and inclusive transport for urban
residents (Cohen and Kietzmann, 2014; Manzi and Saibene, 2017).
Yet, the scale-up of the sharing mobility business models may
generate negative trade-offs, including potential exacerbation of
travel demand, abuse of public spaces, deepening of social in-
equalities and platform monopolies, undermining long-term
environmental and social sustainability in cities (Frenken and
Schor, 2017). Left unaddressed, these trade-offs risk becoming
crippling contradictions to the potential of the sharing economy in
promoting urban transformations to sustainability. Indeed, the

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.06.213
0959-6526/© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
 Y. Ma et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 197 (2018) 356e365
social, political and infrastructural institutions in cities have not
developed adequate capacities and norms to respond, absorb and
adapt to changes brought by under-regulated commercial and
technological forces embodied in the modern sharing economy
(Murillo et al., 2017).
The sharing economy is a contested concept attempting to
incorporate conflictual organising cores such as access-based
economy, community-based economy and platform economy
(Acquier et al., 2017). Without appropriate responses, such tensions
might lead to more exploitative capitalism (Martin, 2016). A stream
of scholarship emphasises how the sharing economy exacerbates
labour precarity (Standing, 2016; Ravenelle, 2017), widens income
gaps (Schor, 2017), the rebounded environmental effects (Frenken
and Schor, 2017) and how the current big data-centred sharing is
de facto ‘platform capitalism’ striving for monopoly at the expense
of sharing values (Srnicek, 2017). It is essential to consider gover-
nance strategies to mitigate the negative effects and adapt the
sustainable challenges brought by the sharing economy in cities.
Despite the recognition that governance is vital for coordinated
and sustainable development in the sharing economy (Schor, 2016;
Salice and Pais, 2017), there is a dearth of literature on the sharing
economy from an urban governance perspective. Existing sharing
economy literature mainly presents two governance approaches:
top-down and bottom-up. The top-down governance model argues
its suitability to control how people access and use the shared
goods/services, in order to ensure quality of the sharing system
(Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2012; Hartl et al., 2016). While the bottom-up
one, such as Martin et al. (2017), argues that grassroots democratic
models of platform governance should be strengthened to reduce
adverse impacts of the sharing economy. Echoing the bottom-up
approach, Ferrari (2016) also stresses the role of social capital as
an essential element to guarantee the sustainable development of
the sharing economy. In addition, local government plays a key role
in terms of regulating the emerging disruptor and the incumbent
(Hong and Lee, 2018).
An increasing number of studies emphasise the structural ten-
sions caused by multiple forces, which emerged with the devel-
opment of the sharing economy and cannot be solved by any single
actor (Frenken and Schor, 2017), so that multi-stakeholder collab-
oration is needed (Cohen and Kietzmann, 2014; McLaren and
Agyeman, 2015; Parente et al., 2018). While both the top-down
and bottom-up governance approaches are appropriate in certain
sharing contexts, a systematic and integrative perspective to
address the cross-sectoral and cross-level collaborations between
the government, society and company/platform co-creating the
sharing economy in urban contexts is lacking in the scholarship.
To fill this gap, we use collaborative governance theory to
investigate the challenges encountered in government-business-
society collaborative processes in addressing the sharing econ-
omy trade-offs in cities. Collaborative Governance (CG) is an um-
brella term for cross-boundary, multi-institutional arrangements
between different actors from public, private and civic sectors
working together to solve a certain public problem or advance a
shared goal (Ansell and Gash, 2008; Ran and Qi, 2017). This stream
of theoretical and empirical work has been applied widely in the
field of environmental management, climate and sustainability
governance and conflict resolutions (Freeman, 1997; Abbott, 2012;
Crona and Parker, 2012). The CG perspective is not de facto opposed
to the top-down and bottom-up governance approaches, but rather
emphasises the need to integrate multi-dimensional governance
models to enable stakeholder collaborations when tackling com-
plex problems. It is this crucial aspect of the sharing economy,
insufficiently addressed in the current scholarship and city-level
governance, that we address in this paper.
We focus on two questions:
357
C What are the key challenges for effective CG towards social
and environmental sustainability emerging during the
sharing economy scale-up process?
C How CG can be improved in specific sharing economy
context in cities?
We answer these questions through an in-depth case study of a
representative free-floating bike sharing (FFBS) scheme in
Shanghai, China, among the most-rapidly developing sharing
economy businesses in the world.
The paper is organised as follows: section 2 lays out the
analytical framework we use, section 3 elaborates the rationale of
the case study context and introduces methods and data, while
section 4 presents the empirical analysis. The discussion in section
5 builds on the critical analysis of the empirical data, highlighting
the importance of new social actors and the reconfiguration of
social relationship in the FFBS that can benefit CG. Section 6 pro-
vides the conclusions, implications and limitations of the study.
2. Analytical framework
Collaborative governance (CG) as a strategy has been used by
governance scholars and practitioners for decades to explore so-
lutions of cross-boundary governance problems, but without a
clear analytical framework to explain its mechanisms, especially
the collaborative dynamics. Emerson et al. (2012) proposed a pio-
neering integrated framework of CG that provides a broad con-
ceptual approach for situating and exploring components of CG
systems, ranging from policy or programme-based intergovern-
mental cooperation to place-based regional collaboration with
nongovernmental stakeholders to public-private partnerships. This
integrative framework consists of three nested dimensions, repre-
senting the general system context, the CG regime (CGR), and its
collaborative dynamics and actions. In this framework, the system
context generates opportunities and constraints that influence the
development of the CGR over time. The CGR itself encompasses ‘the
particular mode of, or system for, public decision making in which
cross-boundary collaboration represents the prevailing pattern of
behaviour and activity’ (Emerson et al., 2012: 10). Then, principled
engagement, shared motivation and capacity for joint action
comprise three interactive components in a dynamic mechanism to
constitute and sustain the CGR in relation to a desired socio-
ecological system.
To date Emerson et al. (2012) represents the only integrative
analytical framework in the field of CG studies. It is thus useful to
apply this perspective to the governance issues in the sharing
economy as it relates to sustainable social-ecological systems. Due
to the inherent multi-stakeholder characteristics in urban sharing
economy, CG would normally be initiated once the new sharing
practice passes the early development stage. For instance, the city
often plays a key role in driving various sharing innovations and
adapting them to its vision and infrastructure, as well as nurturing
its developments (Cohen and Kietzmann, 2014; Ma et al., 2017).
However, sustaining effective CG in the sharing economy is
particularly challenging because the practice of sharing is by nature
a distributed and comparatively open system that not only involves
numerous stakeholders, especially ‘the crowd’ (understood as
opposed to the core institutions and professionals), but also gen-
erates complex interactions and collaborative dynamics that may
constantly challenge or reconfigure socio-economic relationships
in a society (Sundararajan, 2016; McAfee and Brynjolfsson, 2017;
Parguel et al., 2017). These new features embodied in the modern
sharing economy have posed threats to the proper functioning of
CG to accomplish its desired outcomes.
Therefore, we focus our research on the challenges of making a
358 Y. Ma et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 197 (2018) 356e365
newly formed CG work to achieve its sustainable development
goals in the sharing economy. We will explain briefly how and why
such a CG emerged in a particular city and sharing context (Section
3.1). Yet the main analysis will be organised surrounding the key
dimension of sustaining a CG e the Collaboration Dynamics - of the
above integrative framework. The three pivotal components of the
collaboration dynamics constitute an analytical tool to identify key
barriers towards cross-boundary and multi-stakeholder collabora-
tions in our case analysis (Emerson and Nabatchi, 2015), which will
guide the empirical analysis are elaborated below based on
Emerson et al. (2012):

Principled engagement means ‘getting the right people on the
table’, so that through open and constructive conversations,
actors with different views, interests and identities can work
across their respective institutional and sectoral boundaries to
solve problems and to create shared values. In our analysis, we
identify three major groups of stakeholders e business, gov-
ernment and society, especially sharing business users and the
general public whose lives are influenced by the sharing busi-
ness. Thus, principled engagement refers to integrating key ac-
tors from the aforementioned stakeholder groups in governance
processes during the scaling up of sharing businesses, which
defines the enabling environment for the rest of the collabora-
tive dynamics.

Shared motivation is defined as a self-reinforcing cycle consisting
of mutual trust, understanding, internal legitimacy and
commitment, which highlights the interpersonal and relational
elements of the collaborative dynamics. It is crucial to sustain
the newly formed principled engagement towards a virtuous
cycle of cross-sectoral collaboration. In the context of our study,
the shared motivation is synchronising the FFBS with the city's
sustainable transport development plan, which helps to rein-
force the government-business-society engagement. Therefore,
we assess how existing and new actors' evolving participation in
the CG influences the aforementioned shared motivation, and
how they affect the virtuous cycle of collaborative dynamics.

Capacity for joint action refers to a collection of cross-functional
enabling elements that come together to create the potential for
taking effective action towards a common goal. Those elements
include formal and informal procedural and institutional ar-
rangements, leadership, knowledge and resources. Such capac-
ities should be newly generated during principled engagement
processes, and stimulated by the shared motivation, in order to
form a positive and complete dynamic of CG. In our case study,
this analytical component investigates how diverse actors
develop new relationships, resources, institutions and cultures
to support or inhibit the realisation of the shared motivation
through principled engagement.
It should be noted that ‘[t]he quality and extent of collaborative
dynamics depends on the productive and self-reinforcing in-
teractions among principled engagement, shared motivation and
the capacity for joint action’ (Emerson et al., 2012: 17). Therefore,
we place the focus of the analysis not only on each of the three
components of the collaborative dynamic individually, but also
their interplay. Further, we explore the challenges encountered in
forming and sustaining a positive interaction mechanism towards
the synergy between the sharing economy and sustainable cities.
3. Case study context and methods
We use a qualitative case study approach (Flyvbjerg, 2006) to
assess the challenges with the above three interactive components
for collaborative dynamics during the scale-up process of the
sharing economy. In this section, we explain the background and
rationale for choosing a FFBS in Shanghai, China as a case study (3.1)
and the data collection methods (3.2).
3.1. Case study context
The FFBS is a dockless bike rental service; each bike contains a
microchip that enables the unit to be located anywhere within the
cities' government-planned bike parking areas, using a mobile
phone-based app. Generally, bikes are equipped with a unique LBS
(Location Based Service) system, electric generation equipment and
theft prevention mechanisms. Through the mobile app, users can
unlock the bike and are charged automatically according to the
time of use. FFBSs provide a practical solution to the ‘first/last mile
problem' for urban commuters using green transport. In contrast to
existing small-scale, station-based bike sharing systems, FFBSs are
unconstrained by inflexibility and tedious registration processes. In
this respect, FFBSs have been revolutionising urban travel and
potentially creating a niche to transform the current unsustainable
trajectory of the transport sector towards sustainability (Cohen
et al., 2016; Mair and Reischauer, 2017). Since its launch in
Shanghai in 2016, FFBSs have fundamentally changed travel be-
haviours, urban living and socio-economic relationships in Chinese
cities (Lan et al., 2017). It has become the main short-distance travel
mode in the city within two years.
The timing of the FFBS as a disruptive innovation in Shanghai's
transport sector coincided with the production and launch of its
current master plan, Shanghai 2035, which aims to build an inno-
vative and sustainable city. At the national level, since the 11th Five
Year Plan (FYP, 2006e2010), Low-Carbon Development has become
a national strategic priority in China (Qi, 2014, 2015). Despite
problems in transitioning through its complex policy process,
overall, China has succeeded in setting a decarbonising trajectory
(Qi et al., 2016). Alongside national level decarbonisation, Chinese
cities are also going through major changes towards more sus-
tainable and low-carbon development paths (Bai et al., 2014).
Shanghai is one of the pioneer cities to implement and advance this
agenda, signalled by its new master plan prioritising sustainability
and innovation over traditional economic and employment growth.
Within this broader context of low-carbon development in
Shanghai and China, the government has been rapidly developing
public transport, and at the same time controlling car ownership
and promoting electric vehicles, in order to support the city's
advancement towards sustainability (Ma et al., 2017). However,
long-standing transport problems, such as long commutes, traffic
jams, air pollution and overcrowded public transport, continue to
affect the wellbeing of Shanghai's more than 20 million inhabitants.
Within FFBS, we focus on Mobike, the first and most successful
company operating a FFBS in Shanghai. It currently provides 25
million rides in more than 200 cities across the world on a daily
basis, an unprecedented scale-up since its inception less than two
years ago. When Mobike company started to operate FFBSs in
Shanghai in April 2016, both the general public and the government
saw it as an opportunity to help solve ‘the first and last mile
transport’ problem that had prohibited people from relying on
public transport, especially the metro system for daily commuting.
Mobike gained swift popularity among Shanghai citizens during
the city's strategic shift from rapid economic growth towards sus-
tainable transport and better quality of life (WRI and Mobike, 2018).
Therefore, the case of Mobike provides a nexus to map out the
evolution of business-government-society collaborative dynamics
within the urban social-ecological system of Shanghai, China.
The Chinese FFBS phenomenon is worth studying also because it
showcases distinct features common in other sharing and app-
based enterprises around the world. First, it was purely initiated
 Y. Ma et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 197 (2018) 356e365
and run by private companies, and has attracted over 2.2 billion
USD of venture capital (VC) in multiple rounds of fundraising.1
Second, in contrast to most public bike-sharing schemes around
the world, the VC-fuelled Chinese FFBS prioritises economic in-
terests and/or expanding the business eco-system towards future
business opportunities (Murillo et al., 2017; Salice and Pais, 2017).
Third, it relies on ICT, public goods and virtuous consumer behav-
ioural norms to maintain its efficacy and efficiency. These structural
features, however, have also brought controversies, such as ten-
sions between commercial goals and the nature of public goods
(road and parking space) and services (low-carbon transport), the
convenience and flexibility provided by the system vs. The mis-
behaviours observed, as well as fierce market competition through
wild expansion (bikes flooding the cityscape) vs. The scarce public
urban spaces (to park and ride, etc.). These controversies and ten-
sions emphasise the need for multi-stakeholder collaboration to
ensure the proper functioning of FFBSs and to synchronise its
commercial goals with urban sustainability governance goals (Lan
et al., 2017; TUPDI, 2017).
3.2. Data collection
We collected primary data through interviews and stakeholder
workshops, participatory and non-participatory observations. In
total, 30 interviews were conducted between June 2016 to
November 2017 with representative actors in the sharing mobility
sector in Shanghai. The actors include co-founders and manage-
ment teams of the main companies, policymakers in the transport-
related departments of municipal administrative and regulative
bodies, representatives of government and university think tanks
specialising in sustainable development, as well as management
and strategy teams in major automobile companies in Shanghai. In
addition, we conducted 40 interviews with active Mobike users,
querying their interactions with the business, government and
social stakeholders. The selection of interviewees was grounded in
the principle that all these actors are stakeholders that have a
substantive function in the CG of Shanghai's sharing mobility
economy and need to be taken into account. Researchers from the
team also attended major multi-stakeholder meetings between
business, government, consumers and other stakeholders in
Shanghai between June to December 2016, and participated in the
major user group's online and offline activities between August
2016 to July 2017, in order to conduct in-depth observations, build
contacts, and interact with CG stakeholders.
The interviews were semi-structured and focused on three as-
pects of CG between multiple stakeholders:
C Key stakeholders in the sharing mobility economy and their
role in tackling the problems and disruptions encountered
with the FFBS and other schemes;
C The dynamics of cross-boundary collaborations happening in
the sharing mobility sector over time;
C The outcomes of the cross-boundary collaborations in the
sharing mobility economy and the challenges encountered in
solving system problems such as oversupply, distribution,
allocation of public resources, and so on.
To supplement this interview data, additional data was gathered
from a variety of sources, such as company information, public
sources on sharing mobility government policies and plans in
1
https://www.economist.com/news/business/21731675-one-answer-would-be-
ofo-and-mobike-merge-chinas-bicycle-sharing-giants-are-still-trying [21 Feb 2018
last assessed].
359
Shanghai and urban China, business and media reports, to gain a
holistic perspective of the case and to triangulate the interviewees'
statements with researchers' observations and documentary
evidence.
4. Analysis
We divide the analysis into three parts according to distinct
development phases of FFBSs in Shanghai, which are:
Stage 1 (Section 5.1): Emergence (AprileDecember 2016).
Stage 2 (Section 5.2): Scale-up (JanuaryeOctober 2017).
Stage 3 (Section 5.3): Reconfiguration (November 2017 e
present).
For the first two stages, we explain key developments con-
cerning CG, followed by unpacking, one by one, the dynamics of
principled engagement, shared motivation and capacity for joint
actions among three key stakeholder groups (business, govern-
ment, society) e Mobike, venture capitalists, Shanghai municipal
and district governments and social actors such as active user
groups, academics/think tanks and the general public. Since Stage 3
is still evolving, we will briefly analyse the relevant key character-
istics that have emerged so far.
4.1. Emergence stage (AprileDecember 2016)
The emergence of FFBSs in Shanghai was marked by Mobike
launching its first batch of bikes on city streets in April 2016. Within
eight months, in December 2016, Mobike announced it had
deployed 100,000 bikes in Shanghai at a stakeholder meeting. The
meeting, initiated by Mobike in conjunction with our research team
and Tongji University, brought together major stakeholders from
the government and civil society, including academics, media
professionals and active user groups to discuss how FFBSs can
enable cities to realise low-carbon transport goals and citizens'
wellbeing. Issues of CG between the government, civil society and
market players featured prominently and were intensively dis-
cussed. We thus identify this meeting as the watershed event be-
tween the emergence stage of FFBSs in Shanghai and its massive
scale-up process.
4.1.1. Principled engagement
During this period, Mobike was the main driver to stimulate the
‘rules of the game’ for principled engagement between various
stakeholders, especially with the government and the users. As a
start-up with a professed commitment to sustainability, they
wanted to establish clear principles and an enabling environment
for achieving win-win sustainable development gains for govern-
ment, consumers and the company.
4.1.1.1. Mobike and the government. Since its launch in April 2016,
Mobike has been actively urging collaboration with the govern-
ment to pave ways for successful development of FFBSs. Interview
data with Mobike's co-founders show that the principled engage-
ment between the company and the government was initiated by
the company to solve problems encountered during the FFBS
development process:
‘In the beginning, as a private company, we thought we could
provide FFBS alone because we had the technology. We wanted to
showcase that start-ups can make a contribution to the public
good. But as FFBS develops, we realized that we could not solve a lot
of problems without the government. For example, in many parts of
360 Y. Ma et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 197 (2018) 356e365
the city, there is no bike parking space! We have to get the gov-
ernment on board to make FFBS work.’
- Joe Xia, CTO, Mobike, June 2016
In June 2016, two months after Mobike placed the first bike in
Shanghai, Mobike organised a news conference announcing a
partnership with Yangpu District government to promote FFBSs as
an important component of the area's low-carbon transport sys-
tem. Since then, Mobike has been seeking government support
especially for allocating more bike parking resources and reducing
policy uncertainty over the sufficiency of urban infrastructure to
support the rapid development of FFBSs. In addition, Mobike also
creatively cultivated channels of communication with the govern-
ment seeking policy support for future FFBS operational needs,
sometimes through social actors such as influential academic and
media figures.
4.1.1.2. Mobike and active user groups. The fast development of
FFBSs also exacerbated problems of user misbehaviour such as
theft, vandalism and illegal parking, undermining the sharing
values and public space resources that FFBSs require to operate
efficiently. In response to this negative reciprocity, a self-organised
group among Mobike users emerged to help mitigate these prob-
lems. This group of active Mobike users, who deem themselves
‘Hunters’, originally were from Shanghai but now are spread all
over the country, voluntarily re-park bikes in an orderly fashion and
sanction anti-sharing behaviour in order to maintain the efficacy of
the bike-sharing economy. Lan et al. (2017) as well as our interview
data suggest Hunters' behaviour is based on moral values and a
strong sense of virtue, reciprocity and the public good. As a con-
stituency, the Hunters are keen to interact with Mobike through its
app and offline user activities to contribute to its mission of FFBSs
and to the emergent CG. Mobike had also been seeking to incen-
tivise such virtuous behaviours among individual bike users via
credit-earning schemes for reporting misusers (who, correspond-
ingly, may be penalised). Collectively, bike hunters were also
invited to participate in the stakeholder workshops organised by
Mobike in December 2016, evidencing the company's recognition
of their emerging niche and potential further role in the evolving
CGR.
4.1.2. Shared motivation
A shared motivation generated from the principled engagement
aims to synergise the FFBS development with Shanghai's sustain-
able transport system goals.
4.1.2.1. FFBS and the city. As noted above, the emergence of FFBSs
overlaps with the process of crafting the current Shanghai Master
Plan Shanghai 2035, which coined green development as the key
vision of Shanghai's future development. Low-carbon transport
systems, especially public transport plus biking and walking, have
been identified as main development areas. From the beginning,
Mobike had been synergistically aligning its business vision with
the city's vision. Local governments in Shanghai saw the opportu-
nity FFBSs brought about for low-carbon transport and similarly
showed strong reciprocal support by endorsing Mobike as an offi-
cial partner for the low-carbon city development. Meanwhile, ac-
ademics and think-tanks also backed FFBS's synergy with the city's
transformation to sustainability vision. Such a shared motivation
was clearly formed and demonstrated in the December 19 stake-
holder workshop, when a collective win-win statement between
Mobike and influential government think-tanks was published,
endorsing the FFBS as a transformative innovation for
sustainability:
‘The FFBS enables the city's transformation to sustainability and
breaks the locked-in transport structure in Shanghai, which com-
bines the feature of tech and sharing. The main goal of Shanghai
2035 is to achieve more than 85% green transport in all travelling.
In this way, FFBS gives the faith and direction of the Shanghai
planners and officers.’
e Chen Xiaohong, Professor at Tongji University and Shanghai Ur-
ban Planning Commission advisor, Dec 2016
4.1.2.2. Mobike and users. Mobike's growing user groups benefitted
from the company's convenient and cheap services and generally
were motivated to support Mobike. However, most users were not
involved to the extent of sharing the sustainability vision of
Mobike. Only the active user groups, such as the Hunters, respon-
ded to Mobike's vision and endeavoured to co-create the motiva-
tion and CGR necessary to realise a cleaner transport system and
better urban living through FFBSs. For example, a bike hunter
indicated:
‘I like Mobike because it is doing something good to the city. I want
to see it succeed so I am helping!’
- Sun Shiyue, Mobike user, Oct 2016
4.1.3. Capacity for joint action
New capacities for joint action thus were forming in the emer-
gence period due to the strong shared motivation of synchronising
FFBSs with Shanghai's sustainable city vision, as well as the positive
principled engagement. Yet joint capacities mostly were formed
bilaterally between Mobike and other stakeholders, while multi-
lateral collaborations were missing. The lack of engagement with
society affected the collaborative dynamics negatively, though its
consequences were not salient until the scale-up process.
4.1.3.1. Mobike and government. As a result of close interactions
with the government and the shared vision for sustainable trans-
port, the government and Mobike successfully conducted joint
actions in terms of allocating biking lanes and bike parking spaces
for FFBSs in cities - the dedication of public resources to enable
FFBSs. In addition, the police also began to act to enforce sanctions
on misbehavour by penalising user misbehaviours. For example,
some users faced criminal charges for intentionally damaging or
stealing the sharing bikes. Government-business collaboration in
the FFBS thus has significant improved with evolution of the CGR.
With the police enforcement, the general public started to realise
that FFBSs are protected by institutional rules.
4.1.3.2. Mobike and users. Mobike has sought to improve its online
credit system in order to reflect users' behaviour in the sharing
system, including rewarding the online reporting of damaged and/
or wrongly parked bikes and penalising misbehaviours. This pro-
cess was considered by active users as a unique way of jointly
solving problems with the company: the online credit system has
set effective behavioural economic incentives for users to
contribute to the proper functioning of FFBS as value co-creators
(Lan et al., 2017). For example, one bike hunter indicated:
‘The sharing bikes are for everyone's good, not for single one. The
rules of how to use the FFBS are very important. My intention of
reporting is not only to punish misbehaviours, but to remind other
users the meaning of sharing. This is a learning process for the
 Y. Ma et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 197 (2018) 356e365
whole society. I hope I can contribute in my capacity to support the
system.’
- Xjy, the Mobike user, Oct 2016
4.2. Scale-up stage (JanuaryeOctober 2017)
The success of Mobike triggered domestic and international VC
interest in investing further in FFBSs. Investors were emboldened
by observed changes in mobility behaviour towards adoption of
sharing bikes, and by the support from the local government to
ensure the efficacy of the scheme, including with public resources
like road space, parking, and policing. Subsequently, many in-
vestors rushed into this new business opportunity space, leading to
numerous companies to launch similar FFBS schemes in the city
and fiercely increasing competition for market share. Between
January to August 2017, 13 new companies flooded Shanghai with
more than 1.7 million shared bikes. By June 2017, more than half of
Shanghai inhabitants registered with FFBS. The oversupply of
shared bikes created a serious strain on public resources. Massive
numbers of bikes were dumped in public spaces, exacerbating
existing crowding and stress on the city's roads and parking spaces.
These very public problems alerted the government and other
stakeholders to the need to respond to the unintended tragedy of
the commons consequences of under-regulated FFBSs.
4.2.1. Principled engagement
Pressured by the VCs' growth strategy, FFBS became highly
controversial since January 2017. All actors were forced to react to
the dramatic and unforeseen development of the FFBS based on
their own interests, without sufficient time and space for further
collaborative governance development. The pioneer FFBS com-
panies, including Mobike, were fully occupied in responding to
fierce market competition and expanding market share through
flooding the urban space with more and more bikes. Over that
period, Mobike lost its leadership position in advancing the CG
towards urban sustainability, and government and consumers
began to push back.
4.2.1.1. Mobike and the government. Government's initial support
for Mobike was interpreted by the market as a huge business op-
portunity that led to over-investment, over-competition and over-
supply in FFBS within a short period of time, and finally to severe
trade-offs. Facing the flooding of shared bikes in urban public
spaces, the government, especially at district level, swiftly shifted
its attitude towards FFBS, and began unilaterally removing shared
bikes to mitigate the bike flooding problem. The government did
not even inform the companies of such actions beforehand, much
less collaborate; rather it took action first then penalised the FFBS
companies for misuse of public areas. Clearly, the principled
engagement formed during Stage 1 had collapsed.
‘Those FFBS companies dropped their bikes without any notice in
advance. The district management officers just confiscated the
disorderly placed bikes without being able to control the number.
They asked FFBS companies to pay the penalties to redeem their
confiscated bikes. But many FFBS companies didn't show up even
when the government wanted to talk to them.’
-An anonymous government officer, Apr 2017
4.2.1.2. Mobike and active user groups. Once fierce competition
ramped up, the engagement between users and companies also
361
began to deteriorate. Instead of nurturing the positive interactions
with active user groups to improve the sharing environment,
Mobike became fully focused on expanding its operations to more
cities. Despite media campaigns and an online credit system to
reward users' value co-creation behaviours, the positive in-
teractions between active user groups and Mobike were not fully
mobilised; at times consumers even subverted the behaviour eco-
nomic incentives. For example, Mobike's Red Pocket Bike strategy
was conducted to encourage users to activate ‘zombie’ bikes - bikes
unused for a long time or wrongly parked. But this strategy was
manipulated by some users to earn money at the expense of value
co-creation. Some users deliberately rode FFBS bikes to remote
areas, in order to ride them back to operating areas for rewards.
Also, the active user groups resisted the free riding marketing
policy, for this would bring too many low-quality users. In sum,
these moves, far from achieving Mobike's ostensible goal of
nurturing green-win development through positive consumer bike
sharing behaviours and cultures, instead achieved only the objec-
tives of the VC firms - gaining more registered users and rides
through the relentless pursuit of market share via free ride offers
and bike flooding.
‘I'm willing to pay for every ride. The free riding marketing policy
worsened the misbehaviours in my area because people took it for
granted! I don't like it at all! I may quit reporting misbehaver if
Mobike continues this policy.’
-Yu, the Mobike user, Mar 2017
4.2.2. Shared motivation
During the FFBS development process, bike sharing companies,
the government and active user groups got increasingly familiar
with each other as stakeholders in the emerging sharing mobility
economy, but their relationship was far from being a ‘reasonable,
predictable and dependable’ condition for trust building towards
shared motivations (Emerson et al., 2012:13). Without sufficient
trust, all parties found it difficult to comprehend and respect others'
positions and interests in realising the synergy between FFBSs,
sustainable transport and green development more generally. In
Stage 2, the self-reinforcing cycle for shared motivation between
key actors failed to sustain.
4.2.2.1. Mobike and VCs. During the scaling-up process, Mobike
was confronted with excessive competition from other FFBS com-
panies less concerned with sustainability than quick profits. The
fear of losing market dominance led it to comply with the stark
pressure from VCs to win the market competition. Mobike quickly
adjusted its drive from ‘bringing bikes to the city’ to ‘becoming
number one in the FFBS market’. In fact, this period witnessed
Mobike's shift from sharing a long-term vision with the city (sus-
tainable transport) to prioritising the short-term business interest
with its VC financiers.
4.2.2.2. The government, bicycle industrial association and academic/
think-tanks. The dramatic externalities of the FFBS altered the
government's attitudes completely. Especially at the local level,
district governments started to treat FFBSs as threats of public or-
der and condemned it for pursuing commercial interest. Mean-
while, the government placed trust in more traditional bicycle
industry associations and academics to craft improved FFBS regu-
lations. Despite the shared motivation to mitigate the negative ef-
fects of FFBS0 scale-up, the long and struggling standards-making
processes of FFBSs exposed multiple conflicts over different parties'
preferred pathways. Significantly, the bicycle industrial association
362 Y. Ma et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 197 (2018) 356e365
prioritised safety over durability, insisting on compulsory replace-
ment of FFBS bikes every three years. While the academics stressed
the circular economy principles that FFBS companies should ensure
each bike's lifespan for as long as possible.
4.2.2.3. Active users, general users and the general public.
Lacking sufficient support and recognition from either the company
or the government, the active user group continued their efforts to
nurture a better sharing environment, yet have failed to enlarge
their influence. Our online observations show that the Hunter
group's growth stagnated during this period. The Hunter group
endeavoured to cultivate internal legitimacy for their actions
through self-organisation, yet its impact was minimal among other
users and the general public. Meanwhile, the number of FFBS users
increased. By June 2017, more than half of Shanghai inhabitants
registered with Mobike. Most users were spoiled by the excessive
supply of cheap FFBS and not incentivised to help in maintaining
the system, so misbehaviours increased. Moreover, the general
public became annoyed with FFBS's crowding-out of public spaces,
footpaths and blind tracks, resulting in massive complaints against
the scheme.
4.2.3. Capacity for joint action
The initiation of the CG for FFBSs in Stage 1 grew out of the
consensus that a desired outcome e sustainable transport e could
not be generated by any single actor involved in the FFBS. During
the scale-up process, collaborative initiatives were observed on all
fronts, yet none of these developments were strong and stable
enough to achieve effective governance through government e
business e society collaborations. In particular, the attempted joint
actions in this stage did not encompass sufficient key cooperative
dynamics, including leadership, knowledge co-production, policy
development and resource sharing, to institutionalise
collaboration.
4.2.3.1. The government, mobike and active users. Despite the gov-
ernment's rhetoric on the importance of three-party-governance
(government, business, users) e ‘san fang he zuo’, in Chinese offi-
cial language, in practice the city government has not fully inte-
grated active user groups in dealing with the problems of FFBS.
During this stage, numerous policy consultations were held by the
government with the purpose of engaging the business sector to
better manage the rapid development and illegal parking issues
caused by the eruption of bike sharing. However, the government
focused on instructing companies with statistical targets, such as
setting a limit on the lifespan for the bikes and minimum mainte-
nance staff ratio for the number of bikes deployed. Issuance of such
top-down target-oriented policy measures hardly constitutes
cultivating norms of reciprocity to enable cross-boundary collabo-
ration. It was not until August 2017 that the government clearly
sought to set up procedural or institutional arrangements to ensure a
government-led and market-supported CG framework. Notwith-
standing this move, user groups and the public continue to be
largely neglected in the evolving governance model, being ‘repre-
sented’ by either the government (the general public) or business
(the users).
Similarly, despite the attempt to integrate user groups into
decision-making processes through organising online and offline
user engagement activities, Mobike still lacked capacity to respond
to the dramatic growth of users simulated by its VC-fuelled scale-
up period. Meanwhile, the active user groups have produced a
group of leaders seeking to craft norms for themselves, only to find
their leadership and initiatives hardly recognised by the govern-
ment or by the company. Yet, lacking the adequate resources, active
user groups could not lead joint actions beyond their small circle.
4.3. Reconfiguration stage (November 2017 e Ongoing)
Starting in September 2017, some FFBS companies went bank-
rupt (i.e., Kuqi, Bluegogo). About the same time, some FFBS com-
panies were also accused of misusing and/or refusing to return
users' deposit, scandalising the emerging sector. This series of
negative events, along with the tightening of government regula-
tions, triggered VCs to stop investing in FFBSs in late 2017. Since
none of the FFBS companies were financially self-sufficient, scale-
up turned into a rapid cool-down, further affecting stakeholders.
This signalled the end of FFBS's expansion process, and the begin-
ning of the reconfiguration stage e in terms of sharing practices
and collaborative relationships and policy development between
the key actors.
4.3.1. The government
The government officially launched the Shanghai FFBS Devel-
opment Guidance in November 2017, committing government to
the role of the of providing sufficient urban infrastructure, policy
development and planning frameworks to enable FFBSs to realise
the city's low-carbon vision.
4.3.2. Mobike and its competitors
The new Guidance regulations unilaterally forbid FFBS com-
panies to increase the supply of FFBS bikes in Shanghai. They are
also instructed to improve the effectiveness of FFBS operations to
be consistent with the city's sustainable transport goals. Respond-
ing to this firming up of the regulatory environment, Mobike re-
oriented to focus on interacting with the user groups to improve
their relationship through both online and offline services such as
fans activities and interactive forums, and to encourage positive
sharing behaviours from users. Meanwhile, new technologies like
SMPL (Smart Mobike Preferred Location) and intelligent parking
devices were rolled out to improve collaborations with the street
and district governments and avoid the ‘tragedy of the commons’
problems that had emerged in public spaces as a result of bike-
flooding, competition for space and anti-sharing behaviour that
threatened the common good.
4.3.3. Active users
Active Users continued to cultivate innovative channels to
educate the public for better sharing behaviours and to solve the
problems of abusing public spaces in the FFBS. For example, in
response to the public complaints about bikes occupying pedes-
trian spaces, the Hunter groups undertook a voluntary campaign to
re-park disorganised bikes in an orderly configuration that has
become known as the ‘Hunters’ Shield'. With Mobike directing
more resources to nurture the user groups (mainly the regional
Hunter groups in different Mobike operating cities), the activities of
active users sustained, yet interactions from the government
stakeholders remained absent.
5. Discussion and key findings
This empirical analysis of FFBSs in Shanghai shows a clear two-
stage evolution of collaborative dynamics that are primarily driven
by the principled engagement process between three key stake-
holder groups ebusiness, government and the society (i.e., users
and the general public). Shared motivation is generated from the
stakeholder interactions during principled engagement, which can
also advance or undermine the originally desired common goals as
the collaborative governance process develops. Capacity for joint
action first results from the interplay between principled engage-
ment and shared motivation. If successful, it becomes a direct force
in shaping the outcomes of the CG and future collaborative
 Y. Ma et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 197 (2018) 356e365
dynamics. This interactive mechanism can form a virtuous cycle,
yet it can also develop into negative reinforcement (sometimes
triggered by new actors joining the CG such as VCs), endangering
the sustainability goals of the city.
As Fig. 1 shows, during the emergence stage (Stage 1), the
sharing business discovers and cultivates the synergy between its
commercial interests (FFBS) and urban sustainability goals (low-
carbon transport system) and takes leadership to initiate a CG with
the government in order to realise this opportunity. This stage also
marks the sharing business (Mobike in our case) engaging with
user groups intensely, and the user groups in turn supporting the
company's leadership to form new capacities of joint actions. The
business seeks government support because only the government
can provide an enabling environment of coherent, consistent
regulation, infrastructure and other resources to enable its business
success (i.e., legitimacy, parking, and road resources). The wider
society, seeing the benefits that sharing businesses bring to their
mobility and wellbeing, also support the sharing business' leader-
ship for CG. However, the connection between the government and
the society is weak because business tend to treat society as end
consumers rather than active co-creators of value and governance.
If the sharing business remains small scale, the collaborative
interactions will be mainly limited to the sharing system and its
respective users. Once the sharing business (FFBS) scales up (Stage
2), due to its strong synergy with sustainable purposes (low-carbon
transport system in our case), the excessive-competition and over-
supply generate negative trade-offs also at scale, challenging the
newly developed collaborative dynamics between key actors.
Trade-offs are often at the expense of public goods and the com-
mons, a critical infrastructure which, if undermined, threatens the
environmental and social sustainability of the city, leading to ten-
sions, distrust, negative reciprocity and other barriers to full real-
isation of the sharing economy. During this chaotic period, it takes
time for every stakeholder to figure out its position. Before that, all
of the stakeholders take actions largely based on their short-term
interests, which may sometimes impede the long-term sustain-
ability goals.
As depicted in Fig. 1 and shown in the Shanghai case, the gov-
ernment may use hard regulations to impose a CG structure that
makes the sharing company wholly responsible for the scale up
problems. This accountability structure assumes that the govern-
ment automatically represents society, so its role is regulating the
sharing business rather than enabling the value co-creation in the
sharing economy in partnership with business and users. Conse-
quently, the principled engagement evolved from a dyad between
businesses and users to one between government and sharing
businesses. However, such collaborative dynamics proved to be
incapable of achieving the goal of safeguarding the triple bottom
line of sustainability benefits in cities. In fact, neither the ‘general
Fig. 1. Evolution of government-business-society collaborative dynamics in the
sharing economy. Note: the arrows indicate strong collective actions, while the dashed
arrows indicate supportive relationships and resources not yet fully developed into
resilient collaboration.
363
public’ nor the ‘users’ were (and structurally perhaps cannot be)
sufficiently represented by either the government or business.
Rather, FFBS users characterise an independent stakeholder group
in the CG regime that evolves from society's foundational role in
carrying out sharing activities.
We argue that the insufficient recognition and integration of
novel social actors, particularly collective action groups (as opposed
to individual consumers) in the sharing economy represents the
major challenge in fulfilling CG. From our case analysis, two causal
factors contribute to this obstacle:
First, the sharing business users have developed distinct char-
acteristics beyond traditional consumers, significantly challenging
the traditional understanding of market-society relationships.
Thanks to the digital platforms empowering value co-creation be-
tween sharing businesses and participants, the user groups are no
longer merely consumers in a market context. Rather, they have
emerged to be value (i.e. low-carbon transport in our case) co-
creators through novel social innovations (e.g., Mobike Hunters
helping to maintain a sustainable bike-sharing environment
through identifying misbehaviours and modelling correct sharing
norms). Their impact has expanded from private and market spaces
into public spheres (Lan et al., 2017). However, the government has
not realised this reconfiguring of roles among sharing economy
users in society, therefore government has neglected this important
constituency and the reservoir of social capital therein, which is
critical to enabling the sharing economy's benefits to the public
good and urban sustainability.
Second, the sharing economy itself is a distributed system that
not only decentralises resources, but also trust and other social and
environmental transactions among numerous individual and
institutional participants and the wider society (Botsman, 2017).
This distributed system no longer fits into the traditional repre-
sentational model of CG in conventional environmental manage-
ment and conflict resolution (Emerson and Gerlak, 2014; Emerson
and Nabatchi, 2015). In the case of the sharing economy, users not
only make active and innovative contributions to the public good in
public spaces, they also grow (and potentially withdraw) rapidly in
numbers. For instance, there were already 13 million registered
users in FFBSs among Shanghai's 24 million residents in about one
year's operation. Thus, the integration between sharing economy
users and the society becomes significant once the business scales
up, as shown in our Mobike case. This strong representation of
society in the user group forms an important source of social capital
for nurturing a more reciprocal and sustainable sharing culture
benefiting long-term urban sustainability.
After Stages 1 and 2, the reconfiguration stage may either rein-
force the failure or develop a new virtuous cycle of CG. Our analysis
fleshes out the challenges embedded in the current sharing com-
panies operational model, especially in the scale-up phase, where
start-ups invest heavily in the digital platform for consumptive
sharing. This, in turn, stimulates massive scale-up of consumption
but also triggers governance issues and negative externalities.
Substantive reorganisation is necessary to support a three-party
collaboration for governing the excesses of disruption and misuse,
as well as nurturing appropriate users' self-organisation (like the
Hunters). Our analysis suggests that, though this may be triggered
by negative feedback such as public frustration and tragedies of the
commons, reorganisation must be actively fostered through
meaningful triangulation of the relationship between government,
business and society. Therefore, we propose a more enabling rela-
tionship for CG in the reconfiguration period, which recognises the
vital social capital possessed by sharing economy users as citizen
stakeholders in a system that relies on virtuous behaviour to
function, rather than simply consumption. This understanding
forms the basis for a three-party-partnership to support the
364 Y. Ma et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 197 (2018) 356e365
synergy between the sharing economy and transformation towards
sustainability in cities (Stage 3 in Fig. 1).
6. Conclusion
The impact of the sharing economy is vastly extending from
private and market spheres into public spaces in cities. Therefore,
managing its sustainability potentials and trade-offs is a new and
urgent urban governance challenge. Yet, effective collaborative
governance on this front has not only been slow to develop in
practice, but also insufficiently theorised in the literature. Against
this background, our study makes several original contributions:
First, the integrated CG framework applied in our analysis not
only provides a critical viewpoint to assess urban sustainability
governance in the sharing economy, but also reveals the two-stage
evolutionary process of collaborative dynamics in the sharing
economy. It demonstrates the dynamic, contingent and adaptive
nature of principled engagement, shared motivation and joint ac-
tions in the sharing economy in relation to urban sustainability, and
shows where effective CG can be put in place to deal with the
sharing economy stressors proactively rather than reactively.
Second, our analysis highlights the lack of recognition and
integration of novel social practices from the user groups into the
three-party-relationship to be the major obstacle for successful CG
in the sharing economy. Sharing is among the most basic and
resilient of human social acts and the rise of The Hunters and other
action groups shows that users will self-organise to promote its
efficacy. To leverage this social capital, we propose a more inte-
grated and co-creative government-business-society relationship
framework that can improve collaboration effectiveness towards
urban sustainability through engaging the society better and
smarter.
Finally, this research provides an in-depth case study focused on
governance issues of a globally prominent sharing economy phe-
nomenon in the unique context of China. It is worth stressing that,
to date, most sharing economy studies are based on OECD country
experiences that neglect the distinctive development contexts of
developing and transitioning countries especially as a polar of
sharing economy developments. Our documentation of FFBS, its
sustainability consequences in cities, as well as the social and
environmental changes it has endangered, offers a substantial case
of CG during rapid business scale up processes in the sharing
economy. However, more comparative case studies between
different cultural, economic and social contexts can help to
strengthen the theorisation of this fast-evolving phenomenon.
A limitation of this research is the lack of in-depth investigation
of VC's role as a vital component of the business model. Clearly the
swift rise and expansion of the sharing practice fuelled by VC has
not allowed sufficient time for key stakeholders and institutions to
adapt to the complex situation and co-create solutions in a fully
collaborative, agile and integrative way which in turn impacts the
enabling of finance. The double-edged dynamics of VC e both in
enabling rapid scale-up and disabling sustainability potential e
need further study as a feature of the sharing economy's develop-
ment, particularly at the tipping points of the scaling up
reorganisation.
Acknowledgments
This research is supported by EU Horizon 2020 GREEN-WIN
Project (642018).
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