From Static Logistics to Dynamic Ecosystems: Evaluating the Emergence of an Event Mobility Governance Framework in Dubai's Mega-Event Sector

Mega-events compress months of ordinary travel demand into days, and they do so on top of a city
that must keep working. This white paper examines how Dubai has moved from event-specific,
largely reactive transport logistics towards a formalised Event Mobility Governance Framework
(EMGF) that treats surge mobility as a permanent institutional capability rather than a temporary
project. Drawing on the mobilities paradigm and on collaborative and adaptive governance theory,
we describe the framework as a four-layer architecture: a tripartite institutional layer (Roads and
Transport Authority, Dubai Police and venue authorities), a shared data and decision layer, a set
of supply, demand and network levers, and an outcomes layer. Two contributions are original to
this paper. The first is the Event Mobility Governance Maturity Index (EMGMI), a weighted five
dimension composite that scores how far a jurisdiction has institutionalised event mobility. The
second is the Surge Absorption Ratio (SAR), a simple published-data metric of how much of an
event's attendance the public transport system actually carries. We compare two embedded cases
within one jurisdiction, Expo 2020 (a supply-side, fixed-infrastructure baseline) and COP28 (a
demand-side, predictive model), against a pre-framework baseline. Because passenger-level
operational data are not public, the inferential analysis uses an illustrative event-day panel (n =
255) calibrated to published RTA magnitudes; it is presented as a reproducible analytic template
rather than as audited evidence. On that panel, one-way ANOVA shows large regime effects on
corridor delay (F(2, 252) = 53.3, η² = 0.30), crowd dispersal time and incident response, and
hierarchical OLS shows that public-transport share and digital integration jointly explain most of
the regime difference (adjusted R² rising from 0.05 to 0.47). The EMGMI rises from 30.5
(baseline) to 59.7 (Expo 2020) and 79.1 (COP28)