Where Chain Governance and Environmental Governance Meet: Interfirm Strategies in the Canned Tuna Global Value Chain​

abstract

In value chain scholarship, chain governance is the relationship of power among firms in a production network. For economic geographers working on the environment, governance refers primarily to state- and nonstate-based institutional and regulatory arrangements shaping human–environment interactions. Yet the theoretical and empirical links between these two concepts of governance are opaque. Drawing on a longitudinal case study of the canned tuna value chain and a historic materialist method, we demonstrate how interfirm strategies over the appropriation of value and distribution of costs and risks work through the environment. We document moments of change in the value chain that enliven a dynamic understanding of how a lead firm becomes and reproduces its power, and strategies that subordinate firms deploy to try to counter the power of lead firms. We posit that these moves broaden value chain scholarship’s focus from governance typologies toward the gravitational tendencies of capitalist competition and that such tendencies are inextricable from the environmental conditions of production through which they are made possible. This approach enables us to look at value chains and the environmental conditions of production as mutually constitutive, helping to explain vexing modern environmental problems as a core element of the general tendencies, mechanisms, and drivers of power in chains.

Key words:

• firm strategy
• environmental governance
• global value chains
• global production networks
• fisheries

Acknowledgments

The ideas for this article have long been in development. We have benefited from input we received on prior versions at seminars and conferences, including Planet Under Pressure 2012, People and the Sea 2013, Institute on Global Law and Policy 2014, Manchester Business School 2014, American Association of Geographers 2015, Liverpool School of Management 2015, University of South Carolina 2015, and Florida State University 2016. We are grateful for the careful and detailed input of anonymous reviewers and Economic Geography editors. Havice acknowledges financial support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Southwest Regional Fisheries Division and the School of Oriental and African Studies. Campling acknowledges a SDOAS Research Fellowship.

Notes

¹ We use value chain as a general term to group chain tracing methodological approaches and denote empirical phenomenon (e.g., the value chain in canned tuna). We use the GVC or GPN nomenclature to refer to the analytical frameworks and their specific conceptual contributions.

² Following Starosta (2010), we use 'let go of' rather than ‘produced by’ firms because processes of exploitation of labor in articulation with nature produce surplus value. Firms are a formal or customary legal form that encloses this social relation of production.

³ Interview, EU industry representative, May 2007.

⁴ Interviews, EU industry representatives, October 2005, June 2010.

⁵ Interview, US industry representative, May 2006.

⁶ Interviews, EU and US industry representatives, March 2009 and February 2006.

⁷ Interview, Thai industry representative, May 2006.

⁸ Interview, US industry representative, May 2006.

⁹ Multiple interviews, US industry representatives, May 2006, and EU industry representatives, September 2010.

¹⁰ Interview, Ecuadorian industry representative, August 2010.

¹¹ These firms sometimes also own a brand, but it is normally oriented to domestic or minor subregional markets.

¹² Persononal communication, EU industry representative, October 2005.

¹³ One manager called this a “multiregional strategy” (Interview, US industry representative, February 2006).

¹⁴ Industry source, April 2015.

¹⁵ Multiple interviews, Thai industry representatives, April 2015.

¹⁶ Interview, Ecuador industry representative, August 2010.

¹⁷ Sea-web is a subscription maritime reference database that combines information on ships, owners and ownership history, shipbuilders, and ship movements into a searchable application. Data on historical and current vessel flag and registration, ownership, and beneficial ownership for the US fleet were collected using the tool in October 2014. The sea-web website is: http://www.sea-web.com.

¹⁸ Interview, Ecuador industry representative, August 2010.

¹⁹ Interviews, industry representatives, 2006.

²⁰ Interview, international fisheries specialist, May 2006.

²¹ E-mail communication, ISSF, July 2015. ISSF also includes one of the big three tuna trading companies (Tri Marine). But we exclude this node in Figure 2’s coverage of ISSF to avoid conflating nonmembers (FCF and Itochu).

²² Various personal communications, EU industry and NGO representatives 2011, 2013, and 2014.