A human behaviour perspective on horizontal collaboration to reduce the climate impact of logistics

The transport sector needs to drastically reduce its carbon footprint to comply with the Paris Agreement. In today’s sharing economy, an emerging strategy to contribute to this goal is horizontal collaboration. However, most studies on horizontal collaboration or resource pooling are approached from a theoretical Operations Research perspective, and case studies are usually stylised. At the same time, the uptake of horizontal collaboration in practice is limited. An important explanation for this is that compared to traditional vertical collaboration, coalition formation is much more complex under horizontal collaboration, as some players will be included in the collaborative coalition, while others will be excluded. We conjecture that this renders human behaviour much more important than in more traditional vertical supply chain relations. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a research agenda for an interdisciplinary approach that integrates human behavioural aspects in studies on horizontal supply chain collaboration. We review some vital concepts from social psychology and discuss the importance to the success or failure of horizontal collaboration initiatives to reduce the environment footprint of the logistics sector. We conclude that social psychological insights on mixed-motive interactions are pivotal to understand wicked problems such as Sustainable Development Goal 13 on Climate Action, and that interdisciplinary approaches should therefore receive more attention in academic literature.