Building Resilient Agri-Food Supply Chains: A Socio-Technical Systems Perspective

Agri-food supply chains (AFSCs) are increasingly exposed to a wide range of disruptions, including climate change, extreme weather events, geopolitical conflicts, pandemics, labor shortages, food safety incidents, cyber threats, and market volatility. These challenges have highlighted the vulnerability of food systems and underscored the importance of resilience in ensuring food security, economic stability, and sustainable development, particularly through their effects on production costs, trade flows, and food pricing. The rapid adoption of digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence, big data analytics, blockchain, the Internet of Things, and digital platforms, is transforming how AFSCs monitor risks, share information, coordinate activities, and respond to disruptions**, with direct implications for cost efficiency, productivity, and returns across the supply chain.** However, technological investments alone are insufficient to enhance resilience; their effectiveness depends on supportive organizational cultures, leadership, workforce competencies, collaborative governance structures, and stakeholder engagement across the supply chain ecosystem.

While considerable research has examined resilience strategies within AFSCs, existing studies have predominantly focused on operational and organizational responses, often overlooking the economic trade-offs and the complex interactions between social and technological elements that collectively shape resilience outcomes. A socio-technical systems perspective provides a valuable lens for understanding how resilience, and its economic costs and benefits, emerge from the dynamic interplay among technological infrastructures, organizational capabilities, human actors, institutional arrangements, and stakeholder relationships. This special issue seeks to advance theoretical and practical understanding of AFSC resilience by encouraging research that integrates economic, social, and technological perspectives. It aims to explore how resilience can be developed, maintained, and transformed through interactions among individuals, organizations, supply chain partners, communities, and institutions**, and what this means for the costs, returns, and distribution of resilience investments.** Ultimately, the collection seeks to contribute to the creation of more sustainable, inclusive, economically viable, and resilient agri-food systems capable of addressing the growing uncertainties and complexities of the twenty-first century.

This collection seeks contributions that apply agricultural and food economics, socio-technical systems theory, complex adaptive systems, resilience theory, systems thinking, sustainability transitions, and related theoretical perspectives to agri-food supply chains. Methodologically, diverse approaches are welcome, including qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, longitudinal, and interdisciplinary studies.

Subthemes may include, but are not limited to:

• Digital technologies for resilience enhancement and their economic costs and returns

• Socio-technical capabilities and resilience building

• Organizational learning and adaptive capacity

• Collaboration and governance mechanisms and their economic implications

• Climate adaptation strategies and food system transformation, including their cost-effectiveness

• Cyber resilience and data-driven decision-making

• Workforce development and multi-level resilience across individual, organizational, supply chain, and ecosystem contexts

• Economic policies and market dynamics affecting resilience, including food pricing and trade

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
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• ... 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
• 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, Socio-technical systems, Supply chain resilience, Diverse research methodology, Theoretical driven

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.