Material Supply Chain Disruption and Mitigation in Extreme Remote Construction: An Empirical Case Study from a Mining-Concession Infrastructure Project in Papua, Indonesia.

Construction supply chains in extreme remote environments operate without the supplier depth and transport redundancy that mainstream resilience theory assumes, and without the capacity to mount a rapid response. Empirical evidence from such settings is thin. This study characterises material supply chain disruption and mitigation in an infrastructure project inside a mining concession on the lowland coast of Mimika Regency, Papua, Indonesia, where site access is exclusively maritime.

The study uses a mixed-method embedded single-case design with three strands of equal analytical weight. A structured questionnaire completed by all 23 project personnel covered twelve disruption types rated separately for frequency and impact (24-indicator scale, Cronbach’s α = 0.924), four amplification items and nine mitigation strategies. We coded seven contractor-side key-informant interviews thematically and reconstructed the project delay event log by cause. We computed severity as DPS = F̄ × Ī.

Five of twelve disruption types fall in the High severity band. The most severe is pre-emption of vessel capacity by the host operator’s own mining cargo (DPS = 15.81), an allocation decision rather than a performance failure. The delay log records 190 supply-related delay days, of which 141 (74 per cent) arise from two owner-supplied bulk material lines. We name this condition host-operator dependency and argue that it sits outside the four standard resilience families. We instrumented the Compounding Isolation Effect as four sub-mechanisms (α = 0.863), with alternative scarcity rated highest at 3.87 of 5. Informal mitigation matched formal mitigation in aggregate (3.85 against 3.78) and held the top three of nine positions, led by the logistics liaison relationship (4.17, SD = 0.78).

Both constructs derive from one case and one supply chain. They are offered as propositions for cross-site testing rather than as validated theory, alongside a five-component Remote Construction Logistics Framework.