Reimagining transport decarbonisation through Daoism: Governance, modelling, and attunement

Transport decarbonisation has never been better resourced. Multi-level coordination, integrated policy packages, spearheading technological visions, and long-term modelling are now routinely deployed against the climate challenge. Yet rebound effects, implementation gaps, and social backlash persist in ways that more sophisticated instruments have not closed. This paper argues that the difficulty is epistemological and ontological, not merely technical or institutional: dominant approaches treat mobility systems as determinable objects that yield to coordination, optimisation, and prediction, when they are in fact relational, emergent, and practice-dependent. Through conceptual and epistemological analysis, the paper develops a Daoist reading of transport governance and modelling, advancing attunement as a governance disposition oriented to the inherent tendencies of complex mobility systems under climate disruption, social contestation, and socio-ecological complexity. Three concepts — wu-wei (non-coercive action), qi (vital circulation), and yin-yang (dynamic balance) — serve as heuristic resources for interrogating assumptions embedded in contemporary decarbonisation. Through this lens, mobility is reframed as circulation, governance as adaptive attunement for harmony, policy design as provisional and revisable intervention, analytical framing as the holding of plurality, and modelling as an interpretive rather than purely predictive practice. The 15-minute city is the running example, with supporting cases drawn from electric vehicles, road freight, and aviation and maritime governance, illuminating persistent tensions around coordination, rebound, pluralism, infrastructure lock-in, and modelling uncertainty. The paper offers a substantive non-Western theoretical intervention and concludes that metaphorical, relational, and process-oriented reasoning can complement existing analytical approaches, supporting more adaptive, reflexive, participatory, and responsive forms of transport governance under conditions of uncertainty and ecological limits.