Toward Building Corridor-Level Dynamic Capabilities: An Integrative Socio-Technical Framework for Sustainable Cross-Border Rail Logistics

Cross-border rail transport is increasingly promoted as a low-carbon freight option. However, transport and logistics theories remain fragmented in explaining how sustainability is achieved at the route level. Existing research focuses on separate aspects of organizational capability, infrastructure optimization, or regulatory compliance, failing to integrate the transnational characteristics and multi-stakeholder perspectives of rail freight systems. This research develops an integrated socio-technical framework that reinterprets the concept of sustainable cross-border rail logistics, viewing it as an emerging corridor-level capability arising from the coordinated interaction between organizational, institutional, technological, and social subsystems. This proposed framework shifts the unit of analysis from individual companies to transnational freight corridors, which are viewed as socio-technical systems comprising multiple organizations, digital infrastructure, institutional alignment, and stakeholder environments. This framework identifies four interdependent layers: green human capital (micro level), digitally driven green supply networks (meso level), institutional and geopolitical placement (macro level), and environmental and social responsibility perception (ESRP) at society level. The propositions derived from the eight theories identify prominent cross-level causal relationships linking green human capital, digitally driven supply chain networks, institutional alignment, ESRP perception, route resilience, and sustainable freight efficiency. The China-Laos railway case is used to illustrate the applicability of the proposed framework. By integrating digital governance, legitimacy, and coordination into a unified explanatory framework, this study advances transport sustainability research beyond infrastructure optimization and provides a conceptual foundation for future empirical investigation of corridor-level capability.