New Fuzzy Decision Framework Charts ESG Transition Path for Small Logistics Firms

Small and medium-sized third-party logistics providers sit at a paradoxical heart of the global sustainability push. They move the freight, run the warehouses, and connect supply chains across every industry, yet they contribute a disproportionate share of greenhouse gas emissions while lacking the financial muscle and technical depth of the logistics giants they serve alongside. A new study published in Cleaner Engineering and Technology offers these firms something they have rarely had before: a rigorous, mathematically grounded roadmap for identifying exactly which environmental, social, and governance barriers hold them back, and which strategies will deliver the greatest return on scarce investment.

The research, conducted by Detcharat Sumrit and Rodsak Kongsakul, focuses on Thailand’s SME logistics sector, a setting the authors argue is emblematic of challenges facing emerging economies worldwide. Thai policymakers have embraced a Bio-Circular-Green economy model and carbon neutrality commitments, but the small firms that dominate the sector still wrestle with outdated technology, manual reporting systems, fragmented data governance, and subcontractors with limited sustainability capabilities. The study treats these firms not as laggards but as organizations caught between internal resource limits and powerful external pressures, and it builds its entire analytical framework around that tension.

Theoretically, the work weaves together three complementary lenses. The resource-based view explains how internal assets, from financial capital to digital infrastructure, shape what the authors call endogenous barriers. Institutional theory captures the exogenous pressures that compel action: coercive forces such as the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, mimetic imitation of sustainability leaders like DHL and Maersk, and normative expectations from customers demanding low-carbon logistics. The technology-organization-environment framework then provides the structure for organizing potential responses. No prior study, the authors contend, has integrated all three perspectives while simultaneously linking barrier identification to strategy prioritization under uncertainty.

The methodological machinery is where the study becomes technically distinctive. The researchers deployed a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making pipeline combining the Full Consistency Method, the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory, and Quality Function Deployment, all operating within an interval-valued spherical fuzzy environment. Spherical fuzzy sets extend classical fuzzy logic by adding an explicit hesitancy parameter alongside membership and non-membership degrees, subject to the constraint that the squared components sum to at most one. This gives experts a larger, more flexible decision space than intuitionistic or Pythagorean fuzzy sets, and the interval-valued variant captures the variability inherent when twelve experts must reconcile subjective, linguistically expressed judgments.

An expert panel of twelve, drawn from government, industry, and academia through a purposive sampling process with a 60 percent response rate, validated seventeen candidate obstacles using Lawshe’s content validity ratio. Eleven survived, and the fuzzy FUCOM analysis then weighted them with striking clarity. The single most influential barrier, at 0.123, was fragmented collaboration among supply chain actors, followed almost immediately by capital constraints on sustainability investment at 0.122. Regulatory misalignment and inadequate governmental incentives rounded out the top four. The message is unambiguous: ESG failure in small logistics firms is less about unwillingness and more about an ecosystem in which no single actor can move alone.

That diagnosis directly shaped the remedy. Eleven mitigation strategies, organized within the technology-organization-environment structure, were mapped against the validated barriers in a House of Quality, with DEMATEL analysis revealing the causal web of interdependencies among them. When the dust settled, one strategy towered above the rest: collaborating with green suppliers and clients, earning a normalized priority of 0.148. Partnering with industry groups and embedding ESG into core corporate strategy followed closely. Notably, carbon footprint accounting software ranked last, suggesting that digital tools alone, however fashionable, cannot substitute for the relational and strategic work of building collaborative capacity.

The robustness testing is unusually thorough for this genre. The researchers varied every barrier weight across a range of minus thirty to plus thirty percent, generating sixty-six alternative scenarios, and the strategy ranking held steady in every one. A comparative assessment against crisp, triangular fuzzy, intuitionistic fuzzy, and spherical fuzzy versions of QFD showed the proposed approach correlating very strongly with spherical fuzzy QFD at a Spearman coefficient of 0.850, while traditional crisp methods managed only a weak 0.373. In other words, the sophistication of the fuzzy machinery is not decorative; it materially changes which conclusions survive scrutiny.

For managers, the practical implications are refreshingly concrete. Rather than attempting every ESG practice at once, the authors recommend phased investment in measures with rapid payback, such as energy-efficient equipment, route optimization, and digital documentation, financed through government grants, green financing, equipment leasing, and cost-sharing with supply chain partners. Joining industry associations and adopting affordable cloud platforms for shared sustainability data can attack the collaboration deficit at low cost. Designating staff to track evolving regulations and folding ESG indicators into existing performance reviews, rather than building separate reporting bureaucracies, addresses regulatory uncertainty without new overhead.

The study also sketches a phased policy roadmap. In the short term, governments should harmonize ESG standards, simplify reporting, and offer incentive-based compliance schemes, an approach the authors note resembles Singapore’s combination of structured reporting guidance with targeted financial support. Medium-term efforts should build standardized certification and capacity-building programs, drawing on Germany’s sector-wide logistics coordination. Long term, the goal is an adaptive regulatory ecosystem that embeds sustainability into national logistics strategy, exemplified by the Netherlands’ low-emission logistics zones. For a sector that keeps global commerce moving, the study’s central finding may prove its most viral idea: the greenest thing a small logistics firm can do is stop trying to go green alone.

Subject of Research: ESG mitigation strategies for sustainable transition in small and medium-sized third-party logistics providers

Article Title: Mitigation strategies for addressing environmental, social, and governance challenges in third-party logistics: A sustainable transition perspective

Article References: Sumrit, D., & Kongsakul, R. (2026). Mitigation strategies for addressing environmental, social, and governance challenges in third-party logistics: A sustainable transition perspective. Cleaner Engineering and Technology, 34, Article 101317. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clet.2026.101317

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.clet.2026.101317

Keywords: ESG, third-party logistics, sustainability transition, SME logistics, fuzzy MCDM, FUCOM, DEMATEL, Quality Function Deployment, institutional theory, resource-based view, TOE framework, green supply chain collaboration