Small and Medium-Sized Ports in the TEN-T Network and Nexus of Europe’s Twin Transition: The Way towards Sustainable and Digital Port Service Ecosystems

Despite high competition among big EU ports, such as Rotterdam, Hamburg, or Valencia, acting as Core Ports in the Trans-European Transport Core and Comprehensive Network (TEN-T), this paper addresses the marginalized decision-making capability for environmental and digital transition immanent in the Small and Medium-Sized Ports (SMSPs) ecosystems in the EU. Irrespective of topical research, little is said about SMSPs ecosystem sustainability robustness and how SMSPs can pursue the transformative way. Here, management and strategic port decision levels are rather patchy and disconnected from the operational port performance. SMSPs are bound to limited resources and low cognitive, organizational, or institutional proximity, compared to their bigger counterparts. This situation provides a lot of room for critical demarche, since in the TEN-T Network, there are 225 Comprehensive and only 104 Core Ports, the majority qualifying, thus, as SMSPs. This research aims at reducing this research-to-practice lacuna by improving limited managerial capacity of SMSPs on environmental responsibility and digital efficiency. Using an ecosystem concept and aggregated empirical data in three EU macro-regions—the Baltic Sea Region, the Adriatic-Ionian Sea Region, and the Mediterranean Sea Region, three specific decision-making tools are suggested for managerial applications to facilitate and reinforce transition in SMSPs for environmental responsibility, social equity, and economic efficiency.