Government Policy Instruments and Sustainable Supply Chain Management Adoption in Resource-Intensive and High-Impact Industries: A Critical Integrative Review

Government policy is often treated as an external driver of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM), yet policy exposure need not produce durable supplier-facing change. This critical integrative review develops a functional taxonomy of capability-building, coercive enforcement, market-shaping, information-forcing, and orchestration instruments. A retrospective source-critical audit retained 100 full-text publications from an original 103-publication inventory: 96 substantive sources and four methodological anchors. The synthesis distinguishes policy exposure, adoption quality, and downstream sustainability effectiveness. It proposes capability support, enforcement credibility, and observability and verification as potentially complementary conditions, not empirically established necessities. Source-level contrasts show that support can have opposite associations across supplier practices, environmental and financial outcomes can diverge, and improved disclosure need not establish remediation. Resource intensity and high impact are defined at the process and supply-chain level, with six boundary dimensions specifying transfer. Operational proxies and a proposition-specific testing roadmap are provided. The audit supplies design-sensitive limitations and source-page anchors; missing historical search records, single-reviewer interpretation, and heterogeneous measures constrain coverage and causal inference. The contribution is a mechanism-based framework for empirical testing, not a causal ranking of policy instruments.