The role of transport indicators to the improvement of local governance in Rio de Janeiro City: A contribution for the debate on sustainable future

• The urban deficient transportation system represents a major challenge to Rio de Janeiro become a sustainable city.
• Rio de Janeiro is presented as a case study to contribute on the discussions related to sustainable transport indicators as a way to encourage governance.
• The paper can illustrate how a governance created to attend Olympics commitments can deliver results in terms of sustainable indicators.
• Therefore, indicators as CO2 can motivate a good governance to achieve international commitments and targets presented in climate change policies.

One of the main outcomes of the Rio+20 Conference was the agreement by member States to launch a process to develop a set of Sustainable Development Goals. Governments need to be aware of this process considering that there are many challenges to promote sustainable development, especially in cities of the developing world, usually with weak governance. In this context, governance arises as a key aspect to achieve sustainable development targets integrating other goals on specific issues. Additionally it is important to highlight that the other way around is also true, which means, setting goals helps to improve governance and the selection of the best indicator to monitor progress. Taking into account that transport is priority for cities, the development of a participatory, accountable, and an effective governance to support rapid and equitable urban transformation is fundamental. Therefore, this paper considered the transport sector in a developing city as Rio de Janeiro as a methodological approach to illustrate how a set of sustainable transport indicators associated with a responsibility matrix could play an important role as a tool to improve governance while pursuing sustainable transport goals. The use of indicators is extremely helpful to strengthen governance that is crucial to achieve sustainable development. The authors presented the success of the governance structured in Rio de Janeiro to comply the Olympics commitments as a case study and, the CO2 indicator was chose as an example of sustainable transport indicator.