Sustainable urban freight transition governance in small and medium-sized cities

This study examines how small and medium-sized, logistically prominent cities with climate ambitions govern their urban freight systems toward sustainability. It provides a framework for analyzing cities' governance from a socio-technical transition perspective and explores the interrelations between governance activity design and city administrations' capabilities to manage system development. Comprehensive and coherent governance packages, encompassing strategic, tactical, operational, and monitoring activities, strengthen administrations' capabilities to manage transitions effectively. Despite participating in a government-financed network program aimed at climate neutrality, the cities demonstrate substantial variations in their urban freight governance. The research reveals that city administrations operate with limited and fragmented resources, constraining their ability to pursue comprehensive governance packages and making them more dependent on coordinated efforts across geographic regions and governance levels than larger cities. Their governance activities exhibit unspecific transition visions and goals, inconsistent approaches to leveraging innovation potential, weak monitoring mechanisms, and insufficient inter-city learning. Only one city strategically addresses cooperation and networking with the explicit purpose of governing its urban freight system toward sustainability. This research offers empirical insights into urban freight governance in small and medium-sized cities while advancing theoretical understanding of interlinkages between governance activities, system development, and process complexities. For practitioners, the study offers an analytical framework and visualizations for assessing urban freight governance. For policymakers, the findings provide actionable insights to support urban freight transitions in similar cities, suggesting three critical support mechanisms: incentives and network arenas to address low political prioritization, frameworks for designing comprehensive governance packages, and stable cross-level coordination to reduce complexity and enhance stakeholder engagement. • Investigates urban freight governance in small and medium-sized cities from a transition perspective. • Limited resources and actions hamper city administrations' capabilities to manage transitions of urban freight systems. • Provides analytical framework for assessing urban freight system governance. • Offers actionable insights for policymakers to support urban freight transitions in small and medium-sized cities.