Breakout Session at Global Convening on Informal and Shared Mobility  | Bangkok, Thailand | 26 October, 2026 | 2:00 - 3:30 PM

The workers who keep our cities moving—from bike couriers and auto-rickshaw drivers to public transport and shared mobility operators—have deep knowledge of the challenges facing urban mobility. Yet their experiences and solutions are often missing from planning and policy conversations.

Informal and Shared Mobility (ISM) organizations, including associations, unions, cooperatives, small enterprises/corporations,  face a range of challenges in supporting their members and strengthening the systems they operate in. These may include insecure incomes and working conditions, limited access to finance and social protection, fragmented operations, exclusion from decision-making, competition and regulatory pressures, and the growing impacts of platformisation and technological change.

But informal does not mean unorganised. Across cities and regions, ISM organizations are developing innovative ways to overcome these challenges by coming together. These approaches can create greater bargaining power, improve access to services and finance, strengthen livelihoods, and enable workers to become active partners in shaping better mobility systems.

“How Are Informal and Shared Mobility Organizations Building Collective Solutions?” is an interactive breakout session that will spotlight these approaches. Rather than focusing only on organisational structures, the session will explore the challenges ISM organizations are trying to solve, how they have organised to address them, what has worked, and what others can learn from these experiences.

Through practical examples from operators, worker-led organisations and civil society partners, participants will map different pathways to collective impact—from unionising and forming cooperatives to building partnerships, shared services and collective enterprises—and consider how civil society, policymakers and mobility practitioners can better support these efforts.

Objectives:

• Understand the challenges: Surface the operational, economic, regulatory and social challenges faced by ISM organizations, and how these affect their ability to provide essential mobility services.

• Learn from worker-led solutions: Explore how ISM organizations are responding to these challenges through different forms of collective action—including organising, unionising, associations, cooperatives, collective enterprises and other networks.

• Identify what enables collective impact: Examine the conditions, partnerships, incentives and institutional arrangements that have helped these models succeed—and the barriers that have held them back.

• Inform better pilots and policy: Draw practical lessons for policymakers, planners and civil society on how to design programmes, pilots and policies that work with existing worker organisations and collective structures, rather than imposing models from the outside.

The full program and speaker lineup will be announced soon!