Logistics stakeholder engagement – Civitas FastTrack Capacity Building Week

Three municipalities committed to zero emissions city logistics – Bremen, Mechelen and Groningen – have joined forces with logistics stakeholders and leading academic institutions to accelerate the deployment of innovative, feasible and shared zero-emissions solutions, addressing the challenges generated by the rise of the on-demand economy in urban logistics.

ULaaDS stakeholder engagement experts – Melanie Troppe and Günther Illek from IFZ – took part in the Civitas FastTrack Capacity Building Week. The session focused on Setting up logistics fora, an approach for stakeholder engagement developed and tested in the three ULaaDS lighthouse cities. Representatives of eight cities attended the session: Riga, Munich, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Brno, Gdynia, and Murcia.

Engaging with stakeholders is an essential step for public authorities to achieve their decarbonisation goals. Measures and policies for zero-emissions city logistics can have adverse impacts on different actors, making them unpopular, so early dialogues can help prevent resistance to change.

Stakeholder mapping offers a systematic and robust start to effective multi-stakeholder collaboration. To start with, cities should first identify their main stakeholder groups.

Generally, categories and their approximate representation in the fora can be split between:

• Public authorities (local, regional, national, etc.) – 28%
• Supply chain stakeholders (e.g., freight forwarders, transport operators, shippers, major retail chains, shop owners, etc.) – 28%
• Other stakeholders (e.g., Industry and Commerce Associations, Consumers Associations, Research and Academia) – 36%
• Experts (e.g., IT service providers, residents) – 8%

After identifying and mapping stakeholders, stakeholder fora require careful planning. The main steps include both internal and external activities.

To discover the activities involved in one of the ULaaDS fora, read the full recap with images on the ULaaDS website here.

If you’d like to learn more about the ULaaDS multi-stakeholder approach, check out D2.2 ‘Local ecosystem stakeholders’ needs and requirements & prioritisation of use cases’ on the project's Resources page.