This study examines the empowerment of low-power, vulnerable stakeholders of global, complex supply chains as one effective strategy to increase value co-creation and to moderate the vulnerabilities that threaten supply chain resilience. Previous scholars have indicated the necessity of investigating the concept of value co-creation further by including various stakeholder perspectives and suggesting systems of evaluation. This research thus focuses on low-power smallholder farmers within the coffee supply chain by qualitatively evaluating the effectiveness of value co-creation projects. The study also analyzes the extent of development and the nature of empowerment initiatives designed conjointly by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and coffee roasters that are addressed to farmers. The mixed qualitative methodology includes a literature review, interviews, focus groups, and content analysis of 20 value co-creation projects conducted in various developing and emerging coffee-producing countries. The research proposes a theoretical framework employed to conduct focus groups with Brazilian coffee farmers. This framework empirically demonstrates that these farmers are in the process of becoming business partners of the coffee supply chain thanks to various empowerment initiatives, common to most of the analyzed projects, that appear to moderate specific vulnerabilities of the coffee supply chain and therefore benefit supply chain resilience.

In this paper, we provide early insights about a rethinking of the dominant logic of circular economy (CE) systems, which are described by the literature as still too strongly focused on the circularity of physical resources primarily for economic and environmental benefits. We could observe that the traditional narrative of the CE is being challenged by new strategies that include the relationships among stakeholders and the reallocation of stakeholder roles. This is even more evident in the current health crisis, COVID-19. Circular economy can have higher integrated impacts beyond the mere economic and environmental spheres if it is conceptualized as an open and dynamic loop of relationships, where stakeholders’ power, roles and responsibilities overlap and converge into an emergent joint-value creation process.

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