Jane Lister

The Prospects and Limits of Eco-Consumerism: Shopping Our Way to Less Deforestation?

Firms and governments are increasingly turning to voluntary programs such as eco-certification and eco-labeling as core instruments for managing forests. To probe the prospects and limits of this shift toward eco-consumerism as a mechanism for global change, this article analyzes its value for improving forest management globally. It reveals that eco-consumerism is improving some aspects; yet, for both supply and demand-side reasons, the advances are incremental and unequal and overall doing little to slow deforestation. The article therefore highlights the danger of overestimating the potential of voluntary eco-certification and advances a set of policy and management solutions to enhance the effectiveness of eco-consumer initiatives such as forest certification. Solutions include internal incremental adjustments to certification programs, coordinated alongside more fundamental external systemic changes in the marketing, industrial use, and valuation of the world’s forests.

Big retail and sustainable coffee: A new development studies research agenda

Over the past five years, global retail chains such as Walmart, McDonald’s and Starbucks have accelerated their efforts to source and sell coffee ‘sustainably’. Whereas ethical and environmental concerns were the intended drivers of fair trade and organic coffee uptake among the big coffee roasters, now multinational retailers are strategically embracing ‘sustainable coffee’ to build brand reputation and consumer trust as well as enhance quality and profitability. This new trend among mass retailers is transforming the social and environmental governance of coffee production and revealing several critical emerging areas of development studies research regarding the impact of big retail power.

Benchmarking global supply chains: the power of the ‘ethical audit’ regime

This article critically investigates the growing power and effectiveness of the ‘ethical’ compliance audit regime. Over the last decade, audits have evolved from a tool for companies to track internal organisational performance into a transnational governing mechanism to measure and strengthen corporate accountability globally and shape corporate responsibility norms. Drawing on original interviews, we assess the effectiveness of supply chain benchmarks and audits in promoting environmental and social improvements in global retail supply chains. Two principal arguments emerge from our analysis. First, that audits can be best understood as a productive form of power, which codifies and legitimates retail corporations’ poor social and environmental records, and shapes state approaches to supply chain governance. Second, that growing public and government trust in audit metrics ends up concealing real problems in global supply chains. Retailers are, in fact, auditing only small portions of supply chains, omitting the portions of supply chains where labour and environmental abuse are most likely to take place. Furthermore, the audit regime tends to address labour and environmental issues very unevenly, since ‘people’ are more difficult to classify and verify through numbers than capital and product quality.

The Power of Big Box Retail in Global Environmental Governance: Bringing Commodity Chains Back into IR

This article focuses on analysing the consequences for global governance of the growing power of the world’s biggest retailers, illustrating with the case of global forest governance. It argues that the rising power of big retail within global commodity chains is creating both significant challenges — and some opportunities — for global environmental governance. The analysis suggests a need for IR to focus more on the shifting political power of multinational corporations, as both barriers to, and progress in, the governance of complex global issues such as deforestation and climate change increasingly occur in the corporate sphere. More specifically, the authors see great value in bringing research on globalising commodity chains back into IR, first revealing the power dynamics within these chains, then building on this to analyse the implications for global change and world politics. This reinforces and complements the message in Bernstein et al. (in this volume) that understanding the future of global climate governance must include the complex interactions between transnational governance practices and interstate negotiations. But it also suggests a need for IR scholars to go even further to unpack the consequences of how the shifting power dynamics of governance practices within the corporate sphere are intersecting — or running parallel — with more overarching multilateral and transnational environmental processes.

Governing Global Supply Chain Sustainability through the Ethical Audit Regime

Abstract Over the past two decades multinational corporations have been expanding ‘ethical’ audit programs with the stated aim of reducing the risk of sourcing from suppliers with poor practices. A wave of government regulation—such as the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act (2012) and the UK Modern Slavery Act (2015)—has enhanced the legitimacy of auditing as a tool to govern labor and environmental standards in global supply chains, backed by a broad range of civil society actors championing audits as a way of promoting corporate accountability. The growing adoption of auditing as a governance tool is a puzzling trend, given two decades of evidence that audit programs generally fail to detect or correct labor and environmental problems in global supply chains. Drawing on original field research, this article shows that in spite of its growing legitimacy and traction among government and civil society actors, the audit regime continues to respond to and protect industry commercial interests. Conceptually, the article challenges prevailing characterizations of the audit regime as a technical, neutral, and benign tool of supply chain governance, and highlights its embeddedness in struggles over the legitimacy and effectiveness of the industry-led privatization of global governance.