Governing Airbnb in Amsterdam and Singapore: A Comparative Study on Governance Strategies and Styles

The past decade has witnessed the fast spread of Airbnb, a specific example of sharing economy initiatives. Local governments around the world are struggling with policies and regulations to govern the negative externalities caused by Airbnb. In this respect, knowledge is lacking on differences in governance strategies and their effects. This article starts to fill this lacuna by comparing the governance strategies and their effects of two major, but totally different, cities in terms of governance styles: Singapore and Amsterdam. An analytic framework is developed distinguishing different strategies and governance style in enforcing these strategies and different types of response by sharing economy platforms. The Singapore government applied predominantly a hierarchical approach to address the challenges posed by Airbnb, whereas the Amsterdam government mostly adopted a collaborative approach, resulting in different responses by Airbnb. The article goes deeper into explaining these different governance styles and reflects on their implications as derived from the case studies.