Why cities struggle with sustainable urban logistics: Cognitive misalignment in municipal work systems

• City authorities struggle with urban logistics partly due to poorly aligned work systems. • Staff struggle to understand and control urban logistics due to weak strategic, coordinative and tooling capacities of work systems. • Practitioner adaptations suggest ways to strengthen work systems. • Sustainable logistics planning requires work-system capacity, not high-level strategy alone. To meet urban sustainability goals city authorities need to understand and influence urban logistics in planning and operations, but this is difficult in practice. To explain these difficulties researchers have emphasised governance-level factors such as limited leadership attention and weak strategic direction. This study shows that they can also be understood at operational level, as misalignment between municipal work systems and the cognitive demands of understanding and influencing complex logistics ecosystems. A cognitive systems engineering perspective was used to structure interviews with 16 practitioners from four Norwegian city authorities. Participants described how work-system challenges related to operational strategy, coordination, and tools/data constrained staff’s ability to: (i) develop understanding of logistics systems; (ii) anticipate the effects of municipal measures on commercial behaviour; (iii) identify levers for influence across distributed actors and constraints; (iv) justify measures and learn from outcomes; (v) plan holistically; and (vi) build learning and develop processes. Practitioner accounts included ways to adapt to these constraints, including making urban logistics challenges more visible for decision-makers, organizing informal coordination forums, improvising information-gathering on ongoing logistics issues, and experimenting with dynamic regulatory tools. Such adaptations can act as “design seeds” for strengthening municipal work systems. The findings suggest that formal Sustainable Urban Logistics Plans should not presuppose municipal work systems that support understanding and learning on urban logistics by staff. Strengthening coordination, tools, metrics, feedback, competence and other elements of strategic capacity at operative level could be as important as high-level political commitment and strategy in accounting for urban logistics in sustainability.