Videoconferencing, miracle tool or policy trap in the collaborative governance of smart and sustainable mobility?

International audienceDuring 2020, the French government imposed three lockdowns. As national regulation for smart and sustainable mobility had to be implemented very rapidly, public managers converted a significant proportion of face-to-face meetings with local authorities into virtual meetings. For this study, 34 direct and 65 remote meetings were followed, and the 15 public managers leading these sessions were interviewed. After establishing a generic script of collaborative practices and identifying the modifications made in the conversion to a videoconference format, we studied how public managers assess the benefits and limitations of videoconferencing. The findings are:-Content and interactions change considerably in videoconference meetings compared with real-world meetings.-Informational tasks are easy to deliver, but collaborative between local politicians and technocrats are much harder to achieve.-Nevertheless, and somewhat paradoxically, there is strong support for videoconferencing among public managers. As a consequence, and as videoconferencing is becoming the new normal in planning, this chapter explores the way public managers balance the positive affordances of videoconferencing (productivity, accountability and better working conditions) with the more negative impacts of remote meetings in terms of collaborative governance