Managing critical raw materials in energy transitioning supply chains: a Resource Dependence theoretical perspective on supply chain management capabilities

Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) are of pivotal importance for the green energy transition, and their demand is generally forecasted to hugely increase over the next decades. Sourcing of CRMs is a pressing issue which is going to highly influence supply chain (SC) management strategies of involved firms in the next years, as the security of this supply is threatened by several geopolitical and business factors. In this scenario, we decided to study which are the SC managerial capabilities and the associated actionable levers and strategic responses that SC managers should adopt to deal with the supply of CRMs. Leveraging on the Resource Dependence Theory (RDT), we envisioned a three-levels theoretical framework by linking SC managerial capabilities with levers and strategies from the RDT. We built several configurations, called scenarios, and adopted an experimental design which implements a vignette-based rank-ordered logit model to assess which are the capabilities whose variation has a greater influence on the SC control over CRMs supply. Our research is based on a survey administered to Italian SC managers which deal with CRMs in their operations. Results will benefit from revealed and unrevealed preferences of SC managers. The former identify the most suitable SC management capabilities in the CRMsupply context, while the latter provide the strategic responses and actionable levers most suited to respond to the phenomenon of interest.