Brave new cities? Governance configurations for sustainable city logistics

Purpose Despite extensive research and policy efforts, there is still no consensus over the aspects that must be influenced to mitigate the environmental and social impact of city logistics. Existing approaches have primarily focused on optimizing urban freight operations but have struggled to generate lasting and systemic improvements. Building on recent supply chain management (SCM) calls to conceptualize supply chains as socially embedded systems, this study aims to investigate why cities implementing broadly similar collaborative governance initiatives produce different sustainable city logistics outcomes. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative configurational analysis was conducted across twenty French city logistics initiatives. Drawing on Furnari et al.’s (2021) configurational theorizing toolkit, governance conditions were iteratively identified and combined to explain variation in sustainable city logistics outcomes. Findings The analysis identifies five governance configurations. Rather than depending on collaborative governance alone, high-impact outcomes emerge from the interaction among governance structure, stakeholder representation, structural commitment and intervention scale. Research limitations/implications The governance configurations identified are grounded in French city logistics initiatives and should be further strengthened through fieldwork, and then examined in other institutional contexts. Future research should investigate how governance configurations evolve over time and across different socially embedded supply chains. Practical implications Managers and public authorities should focus less on replicating individual governance practices and more on assembling governance configurations that combine broad stakeholder representation, collaborative decision-making, structural commitment and coordinated ecosystem-level interventions. Originality/value The study advances SCM research by reconceptualizing sustainable city logistics as a governance and coordination challenge embedded within socially embedded supply chains. By doing so, it further demonstrates how configurational theorizing explains wicked sustainability problems in SCM by shifting attention from isolated governance mechanisms toward governance configurations as the appropriate unit of analysis.