Prioritizing urban freight logistics policies: Pursuing cognitive consensus across multiple stakeholders

Highlights: • The triple bottom line perspective allows conceptualization of policy outcomes at the urban freight logistics system level. • Uncovering assumptions behind the operationalization of policies is vital in stakeholder engagement. • Action research allows fostering cognitive consensus within and across stakeholder groups. • Knowledge exchange across stakeholders causes shifts in prioritization of policies. Transportation research translates into policy recommendations to alleviate the negative environmental and social impacts of urban freight logistics. Multiple stakeholders from the public and private domain, each with different perspectives and aims, compose a local urban freight logistics system, and decide upon prioritization of such policies. Cognitive consensus or similarity regarding the conceptualization of the decision problem across stakeholders optimizes decision quality at the system level but is challenging to achieve. The aim of this paper is to provide empirical evidence of a stakeholder participation approach pursuing cognitive consensus to develop and prioritize urban freight logistics policies. Our approach involves stakeholders from the public and private domain and builds upon the Analytic Hierarchy Process, embedded in a broader action research framework that allows for iterations of the decision-making process. We provide evidence of the appropriateness of the triple bottom line perspective to conceptualize policy outcomes at a system level. We illustrate the importance of the uncovering and sharing of assumptions behind the operationalization of policies given local circumstances. Finally, we find that knowledge exchange across stakeholders causes shifts in priorities established by each stakeholder, confirming the relevance of structured stakeholder involvement in the policy-making process.