Assessing Challenges of Climate Change Adaptation among Supply Chains in Kenya’s Energy Firms: A Systematic Literature Review

Climate change poses systemic threats to energy supply chain operations in developing economies, yet the institutional conditions that determine adaptation outcomes remain insufficiently theorized and empirically fragmented. The review aims to examine the challenges of climate change adaptation among supply chain firms in Kenya’s energy sector. Guided by the lens of Institutional Theory, the paper employs the PRISMA (2020) model as an analogy to mine 35 verified sources from an initial pool of 180 records across Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and institutional repositories, and to synthesize them through thematic coding across five domains. Findings reveal that operational vulnerabilities are compounded by an 80% climate finance gap, overlapping regulatory mandates, low organizational climate literacy, and supply chain restructuring that progressively marginalizes smaller actors. Across the five thematic domains, institutional fragmentation emerges as the dominant barrier, producing simultaneous failure across Scott’s (2014) regulative, normative, and cognitive pillars and undermining the isomorphic pressures identified institutional theory that would otherwise drive coordinated adaptation. The review contributes a Kenya-specific, theoretically grounded framework linking institutional coherence to supply chain resilience. It identifies institutional reform as the prior condition for durable, inclusive climate adaptation in Kenya’s energy sector.

Institutional Theory; Climate Change Adaptation; Supply Chain Resilience

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