Purpose This study examines how refugee entrepreneurs assemble and adapt supply chains within and beyond refugee camps under conditions of persistent spatial, legal, and institutional constraint. It focuses on how core supply chain mechanisms related to resilience, governance, and orchestration are enacted in environments characterized by chronic disruption rather than episodic shock. Design/methodology/approach The study draws on an in-depth qualitative inquiry involving 64 participants, including refugee entrepreneurs, host community actors, and institutional stakeholders. It was conducted over an 18-month period in the Dzaleka refugee camp in Malawi, a country recognized as one of the world's most impoverished. Findings The analysis identifies a patterned spatial arc through which refugee supply chains are assembled across authorized, semi-authorized, and unauthorized settings. Within constrained camp infrastructures, supply continuity is sustained through improvisational resilience embedded in everyday operations, including flexible sourcing, infrastructure patching, and resource recombination. As supply chains extend into host community and national circuits, coordination increasingly relies on relational and tactical governance mechanisms, such as reputation-based control, brokered coordination, and reciprocal risk management. At the transnational scale, spatial orchestration becomes increasingly central, as entrepreneurs reconfigure restricted geographies into functional supply networks through intermediaries, proxy mobilities, and digital coordination. Across this arc, exposure, coordination complexity, and ethical trade-offs intensify as supply chains move further from sanctioned spaces. Originality/value This study uses an underexplored context to demonstrate how resilience, governance, and orchestration are reweighted and vary in salience across spatial and regulatory settings under persistent constraint. By foregrounding the spatial and relational conditions under which supply chains operate in displacement contexts, the study contributes to supply chain management theory by clarifying how core mechanisms are enacted when formal legitimacy, mobility, and institutional support are uneven or limited. It shows how entrepreneurial agency is exercised through interorganizational supply chain coordination rather than through individual coping alone.
Msowoya et al. (Tue,) studied this question.