Prioritizing collaboration alternatives for ports: strategic choices and key drivers

Ports are increasingly required to respond to both internal and external market challenges. Forces including competitive, environmental, operational, and financial pressures represent challenges that can rarely be addressed in isolation by port managers due to limited resource availability. Ports have responded by seeking different forms of collaborative arrangements with competing ports. Within this context, this study aims to evaluate and prioritize alternative port collaboration strategies identified as port cooperation, port coordination, and port integration. Second, it aims to identify the key drivers underlying each strategy choice. The port collaboration strategic alternatives are evaluated against eight selected criteria covering multiple dimensions, namely institutional, economic, operational, and strategic. Expert judgements were collected from port professionals from the Republic of Korea, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, and were analyzed using the Best–Worst Method (BWM). The results show that operational performance and political consideration are the two most influential criteria in the determination of collaborative strategy. Among the alternatives, port cooperation strategy is regarded as the most favorable, while port coordination is perceived as the least preferred. Each port collaboration alternative yields specific criteria priorities, implying differences in the drivers of ports’ strategic motivation. Academic and policy implications for industry are discussed.