Weaving stories into policies: integrating storytelling in urban freight participatory planning

Urban freight transport remains only partially integrated into Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans, despite its economic importance and growing environmental and social implications. Existing research points to methodological weaknesses, fragmented governance, and limited stakeholder engagement, but these problems have rarely been examined jointly through collective-action and narrative perspectives. This paper conceptualises urban freight as a collective-action problem shaped by coordination failures, conflicting incentives, and weak mutual assurance. Using a research-question-driven integrative conceptual methodology combining mobility planning, collective-action theory, and narrative studies, the paper develops a six-step narrative-based participatory planning framework. Storytelling is treated not as a stand-alone communication tool, but as a mechanism embedded in participatory governance and linked to diagnosis, deliberation, policy translation, implementation, and learning. The framework offers planners and policymakers a structured way to connect technical evidence with stakeholder cooperation while providing a basis for future empirical testing.