This Special Issue, “Beyond efficiency in sustainable operations and supply chains: toward regenerative and net-positive systems,” seeks to advance new debates in sustainable operations and supply chains by moving beyond the currently dominant efficiency-based, eco-efficiency, and instrumental approaches to sustainability. While these approaches have generated important improvements, their incremental orientation is increasingly insufficient in the face of climate instability, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, geopolitical turbulence, and widening social inequalities.
The Special Issue provides a platform for research exploring how operations and supply chains can become not only less harmful, but actively restorative, regenerative, and net-positive. It will bring together conceptual, empirical, and pedagogical contributions that examine alternative logics, theories, practices, and system designs capable of supporting long-term ecological and social flourishing.
The originality of the Special Issue lies in explicitly challenging the dominance of efficiency and instrumental logics in sustainable operations and supply chain research. Much of the existing literature continues to emphasise optimisation, compliance, incremental eco-efficiency, and business-case framing. In contrast, this Special Issue foregrounds regenerative and net-positive perspectives, highlighting the need to restore social and ecological systems, rethink value creation, and address sustainability as a systemic and transformative challenge rather than a narrow performance objective.
The Special Issue therefore invites the communities of supply chain management, operations management, and sustainability to engage with regenerative and net-positive perspectives that can extend current debates on responsible production and consumption, circular economy, social responsibility, and contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals. It particularly welcomes interdisciplinary approaches that connect operations and supply chain research with insights from sustainability transitions, industrial ecology, systems thinking, organisational studies, policy, education, and social and environmental sciences.
By advancing research on regenerative manufacturing, operations and supply chains, net-positive organising, circular and restorative value creation, governance, stakeholder collaboration, social justice, inclusion, and teaching innovation, the Special Issue aims to contribute to positive change. It will support theory development, empirical insight, pedagogical innovation, and practical understanding of how organisations and supply chains can move beyond reducing harm toward creating ecological regeneration, social value, and more resilient socio-technical systems.
List of topic areas
- Net-positive organising and system design
- Regenerative manufacturing, operations and supply chains
- Beyond efficiency: critiques of instrumental and business-case sustainability logics
- Resilience, readiness and adaptation in polycrisis conditions
- Circular, restorative and distributive value creation models
- Governance, institutions and stakeholder collaboration for regenerative transitions
- Social justice, inclusion and community outcomes in sustainable supply chains
- Teaching innovation and pedagogical approaches for regenerative OSCM
Submissions Information
Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available at: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rpc
Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else while under review for this journal.
Journal Information: Scopus Journal Q3, H-Index 4
Key deadlines
Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 01/06/2026
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 30/11/2026
For more details refer here
