Urban freight and procedural justice: who do we recognise as stakeholders?

This paper reviews which actors recent urban freight scholarship recognises as stakeholders and how it represents their roles and interactions in relation to environmental and procedural justice. We conducted a systematic literature review of 54 studies using a deductive–iterative coding approach. We identified 19 stakeholders and organised them into five overarching categories: government, private sector, general public, academia, and labour & civil society. Results show that government and private-sector actors are consistently foregrounded and often positioned as central decision-makers or implementers, whereas the general public and labour & civil society, despite often being disproportionately affected, are less consistently recognised in the literature. We conclude by outlining how urban freight research can make stakeholder identification more transparent and reflexive, thereby supporting policy guidance that is both operationally effective and procedurally equitable.