Introduction: Co-orchestrating Sustainable Port Ecosystems

Abstract

During the past few decades, a sharp increase has taken place in the number and scope of collaborative agreements involving seaports and a variety of actors in these ports’ vertical and horizontal value chains. These collaborative agreements have been the subject of a large number of studies in the scholarly literature. Far-reaching port integration is hardly a new phenomenon, as illustrated by the well-known Copenhagen-Malmö cross-border alliance, which dates back to 2001. However, it has been especially in the post-2008 period (starting with the ‘great recession’) that worldwide managerial and scholarly attention has been devoted to deeper and broader collaborative arrangements involving seaports.