While supply chain resilience (SCR) has been extensively studied in for-profit contexts, nonprofit supply chains (NPSCs) remain underexplored. Drawing on dynamic capabilities theory (DCT), this study aims to investigate how food banks enact and integrate resilience capabilities under systemic disruptions. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as an empirical setting, this study investigates strategies deployed across pre-crisis, crisis and post-crisis phases.
Based on 21 semi-structured interviews with Moissons and community-based organizations across Québec (Canada), this study adopts an abductive, interpretive approach to identify the dynamic capabilities (DCs) underpinning proactive, concurrent and reactive responses.
Nonprofit SCR is enabled by six interdependent dynamic capacities: anticipation, adaptability, agility, collaboration, recovery and learning, aligned with the sensing, seizing and transforming processes. Horizontal collaboration emerges as a pivotal mechanism enabling network-level adaptation despite severe resource constraints. Findings further show that collaboration also functions as a compensatory mechanism when formal reconfiguration capacity is limited.
Findings guide nonprofit managers and policymakers in strengthening supply chain continuity during systemic disruptions. Practitioners can enhance resilience by institutionalizing peer collaboration and leveraging digital coordination tools, while policymakers can better align regulatory frameworks and funding mechanisms with the flexibility needs of NPSCs.
This study extends DCT to resource-constrained NPSCs and develops a temporal, process-based framework of resilience. Unlike prior DCT applications in for-profit and vertically coordinated supply chains, which emphasize firm-level optimization and hierarchical coordination, this study demonstrates how resilience emerges under chronic resource scarcity, volunteer dependence and fragmented operations. Horizontal governance structures further shape how capabilities are enacted across decentralized actors. The study highlights that resilience is achieved through compensatory, network-based mechanisms rather than formal reconfiguration capacities typical of firm-centric models. It provides empirically grounded insights into how DCs unfold across crisis phases in decentralized nonprofit networks, with implications for other systemic disruptions and comparative research.
