The hidden costs of global supply chain solutions

Abstract

Within the international political economy (IPE) literature on global supply chains, there is growing debate about the effectiveness of private global supply chain solutions to address social and environmental problems. Most scholarship takes supply chain solutions at face value, investigating the circumstances under which they are effective, lacking, and how effectiveness could be incrementally improved. These studies have helpfully investigated operational and procedural issues associated with private governance and relationships between stakeholders in standard-setting processes. But the literature often loses sight of broader and more fundamental questions about whether or not private governance initiatives are actually working to solve the problems they’ve been established to address, like pollution, modern slavery, and global North and South inequalities. In this introduction to the Review of International Political Economy special issue on the hidden costs of global supply chains, we analyse key trends in the effectiveness of private governance solutions, drawing on our literature review of 290 academic journal articles and contributions within this collection. We argue that not only are global supply chain solutions falling short when it comes to many of the indicators that matter most, but they come with hidden costs – including unintended consequences, perverse effects, and unacknowledged impacts.

KEYWORDS:

• CSR
• global supply chains
• private governance
• globalisation
• environment
• labour

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Ed Pemberton for his excellent research assistance and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), grant #895-2018-1002 for research funding. We are also grateful to James Meadowcroft for his feedback on research framing, Rita Steele for supporting background research assistance, and to Stefano Ponte, Peter Dauvergne, Claire Cutler, Michael Bloomfield, Hans Krause Hansen, Philippe Le Billon, Ben Cashore, Kate MacDonald, Ed Pemberton and David Lark for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. We thank colleagues within the University of Sheffield Department of Politics and International Relations and Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) for their feedback when an early version of this article was presented within their seminar series.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See: http://iris.saasaccreditation.org/

2 Note on search methodology: The goal of this literature review was to collect as broad a range of articles as possible covering the effectiveness of global supply chain solutions in achieving environmental and social sustainability. To locate the literature, research team member Edward Pemberton conducted searches on the Web of Science (WoS) database of journal repositories. All of the search strings below were combined with the following top-level string using the WoS advanced search function:

TI = (Impact OR Effectiv* OR Legiti* OR Perform* OR Success OR Fail* OR Weak* OR Inadequ*) AND SU=(Business & Economics OR International Relations OR Government & Law OR Geography OR Development Studies OR Public Administration OR Urban Studies OR Area Studies). Where an asterisk (*) is used, it represents an instruction to return any result that contains this string as part of a larger word.

Key search terms included:

TS = (Supply Chain AND Corporate Social Responsibility OR CSR)

TS = (Forest Stewardship Council OR FSC)

TS = (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification OR PEFC)

TS = (Fairtrade)

TS = (Rainforest Alliance)

TS = (UTZ OR Universal Trade Zone)

TS = (Global Coffee Platform)

TS = (RSPO OR Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil)

TS = (Marine Stewardship Council)

TS = (BCI OR Better Cotton Initiative)

TS = ("Global Reporting Initiative")

TS = (Global Compact)

TS = (Code of Conduct AND Supply Chain)

TS = (Responsible Sourcing)

TS = (Sustainable Palm Oil Initiative)

TS = ("Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative")

TS = ("Multi-Stakeholder Initiativ*" OR "Multi Stakeholder Initiativ*)

TS = ("Multi-Stakeholder Govern*") OR "Multi Stakeholder Govern*")

TS = ("Social Auditing" AND Supply Chain)

TS = ("Fair Labour Association")

TS = ("Global Network Initiative")

TS = (Bonsucro OR  Better Sugarcane Initiative)

TS = ("Roundtable on Responsible Soy")

TS = ("Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials")

TS = (ISEAL)

This approach produced a list of results that was subjected to an initial review of titles by the research team to exclude anything that was clearly not relevant to the topic. The list was further reduced by excluding anything that, from the title, clearly focused on financial performance rather than environmental or social performance. This produced a list of 346 articles, which were reviewed more thoroughly by careful inspection of their abstracts to arrive at a list of 290 articles that addresses the effectiveness of global supply chain solutions in relation to social and environmental criteria. For final list, see Supplementary Material.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Genevieve LeBaron

Genevieve LeBaron is Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on forced labour and social issues in global supply chains, and the political economy of corporations and their governance. She was elected to the College of the Royal Society of Canada in 2020.

Jane Lister

Jane Lister is a Research Associate with the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia. Her work focuses on supply chain governance and the business, politics and environmental effectiveness of corporate social responsibility.