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

Abstract

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). We close with ownership-assigned recommendations for RTA leadership and a research agenda for validating the index with operational data.