Multi-municipality inland ports face a critical coordination gap. While organizationally autonomous, they must collaborate on shared operations. This collaboration currently relies on fragmented emails, spreadsheets, and disconnected local systems, leading to slow decisions, duplicated work, and blurred responsibility. This research addresses this socio-technical problem by designing a conceptual framework that prioritizes governance over technology. The BRIDGE (Business & Rules Integration for Data & Governance Exchange) Framework is a "capability-first" guide that provides a structured process for autonomous authorities to establish shared rules before building a shared platform. Using a design science strategy with the Port of Twente as the primary case, the framework was developed and validated. The resulting artifact is a layered, minimal, and technology-independent framework aligned with TOGAF's Business and Application perspectives. It introduces four explicit decision gates, Legal, Data-Quality, Cost, and Change, to ensure collaboration is sustainable, transparent, and auditable. Validation interviews with four inland ports in the Netherlands (Twente, Venlo, Brabant Ports, and Bergen op Zoom) confirmed the framework is highly relevant, understandable, and feasible when adopted incrementally. The primary barrier identified by stakeholders, cost sensitivity, is directly mitigated by the framework’s emphasis on reusing existing tools and establishing a minimal, shared data core. The BRIDGE framework delivers a practical, repeatable process that enables multi-authority ports to build shared institutional capacity from the ground up.
Keywords: inland ports; multi-municipality; centralized communication; data sharing; conceptual framework; design science; governance; TOGAF.