Decarbonising last-mile deliveries: When the national strategy fails to meet local needs and expectations

• The paper explores challenges and priorities of 35 local authorities and 25 councillors in England for decarbonising last-mile deliveries. • Lack of clarity in governance roles and low prioritisation of freight in local politics are key barriers to decarbonising last-mile deliveries. • The paper emphasises the value of co-design workshops for collaboratively developing and testing place-based decarbonisation solution. • Urban-Rural divide: different delivery challenges, suggesting e-cargobikes for urban areas and smaller electric vehicles for rural settings. • Foster collaboration, clarify governance, prioritise freight in politics, and promote consumer behaviour change for net-zero local freight. This paper explores views and perceptions of 35 local authorities towards potential solutions to decarbonise last-mile deliveries in England and presents their perspectives towards potential challenges and drivers to their implementation. The methodological approach is based on co-design and participatory methods to enable local authorities with different knowledge and expertise to produce, through back-casting, a series of specific actions that can support the implementation of effective measures to decarbonise last-mile deliveries. Results were presented to and stress-tested with 25 councillors, to understand to what extent sustainable transport policies for last-mile deliveries meet political will. Findings show that behaviour change, and collaborative schemes have the potential to have a stronger impact than new and clean technologies in reducing carbon emissions from last-mile deliveries, even though their implementation would be more difficult and less politically appealing. The paper also considers how different levels of governance can contribute to enable the decarbonisation pathway and reveals that lack of power, capacity and capabilities on local freight would be a major challenge for local governments. The paper recommends prioritise stakeholder collaboration, clarifying governance roles, integrating freight into political agendas, adopting systems thinking for planning, and fostering end-consumer behaviour change to accelerate the transition to net-zero last-mile deliveries.