Delivery Drone Dilemmas: Prioritising the Sustainability Concerns of Citizens and Practitioners

The introduction of drones as part of a future logistics systems could enhance the efficiency of some goods movements but brings with it the prospect of a change to the environment and society. This paper reports on a study which seeks to identify how varied the concerns are amongst both practitioners and citizens and also how different the concerns of the public are from those of practice. The research uses Q-Sort methods to understand the critical variables and clusters of opinions which underlie policy controversies. A Q-Sort was first conducted with 53 professional stakeholders before a common, but reduced size Q-Sort was undertaken with a representative sample across three different local geographies (N = 610) in the UK. The findings suggest many common clusters of viewpoints across the expert and citizen samples, with the key interactions being between the degree of in principle support for drones for delivery and the degree of practical control over their introduction. However, the citizen group was dominated by drone sceptics worried about privacy, terrorism and environmental impacts in a way which was not manifested in the experts. Few differences occurred between places suggesting that simple urban-rural dichotomies do not define groups of opinions.