Transition through dialogue: A stakeholder based decision process for cities: The case of city distribution

• A stakeholder-based evaluation framework for freight transport is proposed.
• The paper examines five city distribution stakeholders and their core objectives.
• The Gotheborg example illustrates the City Distribution – Multi-Actor Multi-Criteria Analysis.
• Stakeholders' preferences are included at each stage of the decision process.

Urban areas are facing several challenges. One of them is how to organise freight transport in a sustainable way. Most of the measures that have been experienced suffer from a lack of systematic evaluation and assessment of their short and long term effects. That is why large scale or long term adoptions often fail, because not all stakeholders were taken into account (Macharis & Melo, 2011). Consequently involving these actors and their objectives is a primary focus to develop the evaluation methodology. The Multi-Actor Multi-Criteria Analysis (MAMCA) methodology suits perfectly in this aim. Within this paper, a specific evaluation framework for city distribution (CD-MAMCA) is explained with its step-by-step approach. The relevant stakeholders within urban and interurban freight transport context are shown together with their important criteria.