Advancing Sustainability and Resilience in Agri-Food Supply Chains Through Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methods

Agri-food supply chains (AFSCs) are increasingly confronted with multifaceted challenges stemming from climate change, global trade disruptions, geopolitical tensions, and shifting consumer expectations for high-quality, nutritious, and affordable food products. These dynamic and often interrelated pressures necessitate strategic efforts from practitioners, scholars, and policymakers to build AFSCs that are both resilient to disruptions and sustainable in the long term. To navigate this complexity, a range of resilience capabilities, such as supply chain collaboration, real-time information sharing, and a proactive risk management culture, have been identified as critical in enabling supply chains to prepare for, respond to, recover from, and adapt to diverse disruptions. In parallel, sustainable strategies, including environmentally responsible farming practices, circular economy models, and green logistics, are gaining traction as essential components for achieving long-term AFSC viability. However, the implementation of such strategies is particularly challenging for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which comprise the majority of AFSC stakeholders. Limited financial, technological, and human resources, coupled with a complex and uncertain decision-making environment, often constrain their capacity to adopt and operationalize resilient and sustainable practices.

This underscores the urgent need for robust decision support tools capable of handling multiple, and sometimes conflicting, objectives. In this context, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods have emerged as valuable analytical frameworks, enabling stakeholders to evaluate and prioritize alternatives by integrating environmental, social, and economic dimensions. Techniques such as Total Interpretive Structural Modelling (TISM) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) offer structured approaches to support informed, transparent, and context-specific decision-making in AFSCs. This special issue aims to advance scholarly understanding of how MCDM methods can support resilience and sustainability decision-making in AFSCs. We welcome both theoretical and empirical contributions that offer methodological innovations, practical applications, and policy insights. Relevant topics for submission include, but are not limited to, the following subthemes:

• Integration of MCDM with AFSC risk analysis to assess and mitigate the impacts of disruptions.

• Application of MCDM in sustainable supplier selection, incorporating environmental, ethical, and performance-based criteria.

• Evaluation of social and ethical practices in supply networks using MCDM approaches.

• Identification and prioritization of resilience capabilities, practices, enablers, and strategies through structured decision models.

• Exploration and ranking of enablers and barriers for adopting digital technologies (e.g., IoT, blockchain, AI) to foster/impede sustainable and resilient AFSCs.

• Development of novel or hybrid MCDM methodologies tailored to the unique challenges of AFSC resilience and sustainability.

We invite researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplines—including operations management, agricultural economics, information systems, and sustainability science—to contribute high-quality papers that bridge theory and practice. Submissions that offer interdisciplinary perspectives, case studies, comparative analyses, or decision-support frameworks grounded in real-world AFSC contexts are especially encouraged.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Agri-food supply chain, resilience, sustainability, multi-criteria decision-making

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.