Prioritizing sustainable supply chain capability for bio-circular-green economy implementation in agri-food supply chains: A circular intuitionistic fuzzy approach

Agri-food supply chains play a critical role in sustainable development but continue to face challenges related to resource-intensive production, food loss, and environmental impacts. The Bio-Circular-Green (BCG) economy offers an integrated pathway toward sustainability through bio-based resource utilization, circular material flows, and environmentally responsible operations. This study proposes an integrated Circular Intuitionistic Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (CIF-MCDM) framework with Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to prioritize sustainable supply-chain capabilities (SSCCs) supporting BCG implementation in agri-food systems. Grounded in the Resource-Based View (RBV) and Dynamic Capabilities View (DCV), the framework incorporates stakeholder priorities, capability interdependencies, and uncertainty in expert judgments within a unified decision-support structure. An end-to-end rice supply chain under Thailand's Royal Patronage BCG pilot project is employed as the case study. The methodological contribution lies in integrating CIF theory with deployment-oriented capability analysis to simultaneously evaluate stakeholder requirements, causal interrelationships, and strategic capability priorities under uncertainty. The results identify bio-quality and food safety compliance, traceability, and waste reduction as the most critical stakeholder requirements for BCG implementation. After incorporating network interdependencies, the top three prioritized SSCCs are closed-loop coordination and stakeholder engagement, circular reuse, recycling, and responsible disposal, and reverse logistics and recovery management. The findings demonstrate that circular and return-oriented capabilities exert the strongest systemic influence on BCG supply-chain performance. From a managerial perspective, organizations should prioritize integrated circular coordination mechanisms and reverse logistics infrastructures before pursuing advanced sustainability initiatives to strengthen long-term sustainability, resilience, and circularity performance.