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 article info Article history: Received 1 December 2017 Received in revised form 16 March 2018 Accepted 19 June 2018 Available online 21 June 2018 Keywords: Collaborative governance Sustainability Urban Sharing economy Free-floating bike sharing abstract Most sharing mobility business models promise green and affordable transport in cities. However, their rapid scale-up processes have often caused significant disruption and stresses to urban governance. Free- floating bike sharing (FFBS) is highly-touted in Shanghai as a means to bring biking habits back to an overly car-congested city. Despite substantially changing the behaviour of Shanghai citizens to adopt 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 examine how commercial, political and social actors interact in addressing the emerging public problems in the FFBS scale-up process from a collaborative governance perspective. We find that the lack of recognition and integration of new social actors, such as user groups, as agents in the scheme are key obstacles to a fully-functioning government-business-society collaborative regime. We argue that this 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, 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 * Corresponding author. Tel.: 086 18101912837. E-mail address: pooher2222@163.com (J. Lan). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Cleaner Production journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.06.213 0959-6526/© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Cleaner Production 197 (2018) 356e365