Value capture amidst crisis? A geographical political economy perspective on value chain resilience

How can different value chain actors mitigate threats or benefit from moments of volatility? This question has become essential as global value chains are restructuring, with policymakers and management scholars calling for increasing value chain resilience. Surveying geographers’ recent contributions, this paper develops a geographical political economy of value chain resilience, which helps explain immanent value struggles' relation to collaboration, conflict, and contingency. The paper does so, first, by elaborating on circulating and fixed capital for various fractions of capital. Second, the paper shows the antithetical position of labour and biophysical environments within and beyond value chains’ resilience.