•We examine value chain governance and environmental upgrading in maritime shipping.•The main external drivers for upgrading are regulation, cooperation and buyer demands.•Upgrading is more likely in ...unipolar value chains with consumer-facing lead firms.•Alignment of global regulation and voluntary sustainability initiatives is needed.
In this article, we examine the relations between global value chain governance and environmental upgrading in maritime shipping. Drawing from interviews with global shipping companies and major buyers of shipping services (cargo-owners), we reveal the key issues and challenges faced in improving the environmental performance of maritime transportation. Contributing to the Global Value Chain (GVC) literature, we compare and analyze the influence of three main external drivers on environmental upgrading in the tanker, bulk and container shipping segments: regulation, cooperation and buyer demands. Our findings suggest that environmental upgrading is more likely to occur when global value chains are characterized by unipolar governance and where the lead firms are consumer-facing companies with reputational risks. Furthermore, environmental upgrading in shipping is not likely to materialize without clear and enforceable global regulation and stronger alignment between regulation and voluntary sustainability initiatives.
Environmental upgrading is becoming increasingly important in terms of leveraging sustainability in global value chains (GVCs). Existing research focuses on environmental upgrading as a process, ...while the drivers and outcomes often remain unclear. We address this limitation through a qualitative case study of the South African fruit industry based on interviews and documents, where we investigate the drivers and outcomes of environmental upgrading strategies with a focus on irrigation water use and sustainability. We share three important findings in our paper, which contribute to the literature. First, we identify environmental risk as an important driver for environmental upgrades that has so far been overlooked. Second, we question the current focus of environmental upgrading strategies on technological interventions. Focusing on technological interventions alone, however, is insufficient to address local and global challenges regarding water resources sustainability. Our third finding emphasises the need to consider the wider environmental and political economic context within which environmental upgrading takes place. This is because environmental upgrading strategies can actively contribute to the development of environmental risks for other actors, within or beyond value chains, and therefore have clear limits in their contribution to increasing sustainability.
•Research in South Africa's fruit industry offers insights into processes of environmental upgrading around water management.•Environmental risk is an important driver for environmental upgrades in fruit value chains.•Technological interventions alone are insufficient to address the sustainability of local and global water resources.•Environmental upgrading strategies can actively contribute to the development of environmental risks for other actors.•The GVC approach emphasises how global dynamics touch down locally and interplay with local institutions and governance regimes.
•Material properties influence costs of transportation and need for collaboration for recycling;•Proximity is important for end-of-life environmental upgrading;•Environmental upgrading requires ...balancing costs and capabilities;•Local collaboration is necessary for recycling of some materials.
End-of-life environmental upgrading can contribute to more sustainable use of natural resources. The authors look at recycling as end-of-life environmental upgrading and explore what influences recycling of discarded hard plastic equipment in the Norwegian aquaculture industry. They study the role of institutional, geographical, and social proximity in environmental upgrading of the plastics value chain in aquaculture and combine the concepts of environmental upgrading, proximity, and cost-capability ratio into a framework to understand better the conditions for end-of-life environmental upgrading. The findings reveal that material properties can be crucial for end-of-life environmental upgrading, as they can both influence costs of environmental upgrading and require development of new capabilities for environmental upgrading. To balance the costs and capabilities related to environmental upgrading, actors need to take geographical, institutional, and social dimensions of proximity into account. In conclusion, the development of recycling solutions in global value chains, such as end- of-life environmental upgrading, is affected by how proximity influences costs and drives development of capabilities.
With the proclaimed advent of Industry 4.0 in supply chains, digitalisation is expected to restructure the ways in which buying firms and suppliers in supply chains collaborate, including on ...sustainability issues. Digital technologies are expected to foster information exchange and facilitate collaboration on sustainability issues between firms. Yet, there is limited empirical evidence explaining the role of Industry 4.0 in the context of sustainable supply chain management. This qualitative, exploratory study examines digitalisation in the electronics supply chain and its implications for sustainable supply chain collaboration (SCC). We focus on environmental sustainability aspects, such as environmental data analysis and energy use in the supply chain. We conducted 18 interviews with representatives from international electronics buying firms and Chinese suppliers to explore a) how digital technologies are currently used in SCC, and b) which opportunities, risks, and obstacles are associated with digitalisation in sustainable SCC. Our results indicate that a broad range of digital technologies on different digital maturity levels (including Industry 4.0 technologies) are used in SCC, but their use for sustainability purposes is still underdeveloped. Digitalisation is expected by most firms to improve sustainability, e.g., using big data analytics for energy management or easing the transfer of sustainability knowledge in the chain (what we call "digital environmental upgrading"). We argue, however, that if firms do not prioritise addressing sustainability through digitalisation in collaboration, digitalisation-related sustainability potentials will either not materialise on the firm-level, e.g., due to data sharing concerns, or will tend to be overshadowed by the negative indirect effects of digitalisation, such as rebound effects. We propose three political and managerial levers to enhance the overall socio-ecological performance of the supply chain.
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•We examine ports’ potential for greening maritime transport and global value chains.•Ports hold considerable potential for facilitating environmental upgrading.•High visibility of emissions is key ...for upgrading and should be further enhanced.•High tool implementation complexity can be tackled by enhanced collaboration.•Ports should forge alliances with cargo-owners to green maritime transport.
Ports are crucial hubs in the functioning of the global economy, and maritime transport is a major emitter of air pollutants. Ports have considerable potential for promoting environmental upgrading in maritime transport and along global value chains more generally, but so far have been only partially successful in doing so. We examine results, limitations and future potential of voluntary initiatives that have been carried out by selected European and North American port authorities, which are considered frontrunners in environmental management. Drawing from the insights of global value chain analysis and organizational theory, we find that low ‘tool implementation complexity’ and high ‘issue visibility’ concerning emissions are key facilitators of environmental upgrading. We suggest that ports can intervene in two main ways to improve the environmental performance of maritime transport beyond their organizational and physical boundaries: by lowering tool implementation complexity through stronger collaboration within global value chains; and by enhancing emission visibility through alliances with cargo-owners and regulators.
Much of the literature on environmental sustainability in global value chains (GVCs) focuses on how ‘lead firms’ (usually global buyers or retailers) can improve the environmental conditions of ...production among their various layers of suppliers. This approach focuses on the vertical governance dynamics of environmental upgrading along with GVCs. In our contribution, we emphasize the role of horizontal governance as a driver that underpins environmental upgrading processes. These horizontal elements include institutional support, pressure from civil society groups and political dynamics at the local level – which have been relatively overlooked in this literature so far. We examine environmental upgrading in Italian wine value chains, focusing on the fast-growing but environmentally-contested Prosecco and Valpolicella districts. Our analysis suggests that firms within the same industry may follow different processes of environmental upgrading – through certification, going ‘back to tradition’, technological innovation and/or as an articulation of local politics – also depending on their size. We conclude that horizontal governance is playing a more important role than previously thought in shaping environmental upgrading and provide some suggestions for future research in this realm.
This paper, through a systematic literature review, seeks to verify how the literature identifies the relationship between company’s integration into the global value chain and environmental ...upgrading. The purpose is to evaluate if the literature presents a favorable or unfavorable view of the relationship between company’s GVC and environmental upgrading using as a guide six of the 17 United Nations environment-related Sustainable Development Goals to propose a more in-depth understanding of perspectives addressed by the scholars. A survey of two databases identified eighty-four articles addressing the issue and found that the view of integration into global value chains from the standpoint of environmental upgrading is favorable at the country level but unfavorable at the sector level. The overall result presents an unfavorable outlook for environmental upgrading. The results show that the production displacement resulting from the fragmentation of activities also transferred environmental concerns and consequences, making environmental upgrading a critical issue.
•Agenda 2030 is firmly linked to Global Value Chain opportunities and challenges.•Overall result indicates an unfavorable outlook for environmental upgrading.•Environmental upgrading is favorable at country but unfavorable at sector level.•Country level favorable outlook related to Sustainable Development Goals 7 and 12.•Sector level unfavorable outlook related to Goals 6, 12, 13, 14 and 15.
The global apparel industry has been a gateway to industrialization, but changes in the global economy have eroded the benefits from participating in apparel global supply chains, leading to thin ...industrialization in low-income countries where suppliers firms are squeezed between low prices and high requirements. More recently, buyers added improved environmental performance as a new requirement for their suppliers, seeking to avoid brand risks in their supply chains due to consumer awareness. This environmental upgrading focused on eco-efficiency gains, which increased productivity among suppliers while using fewer resources, but buyers captured most of the benefits in terms of maintaining low prices due to market power imbalances. This article aims to shift the debate on the limits of participating in global supply chains by conceptualizing the opportunities available to late industrializing countries from embedding the environmental upgrading of individual supplier firms within a broader green industrialization process, which offers more opportunities for value capture and inter-industry linkages through circular industrial economies. We use this conceptual approach to examine the newest apparel sourcing location, Ethiopia, and the government's green industrial policy that aimed to spur industrialization through apparel specific eco-industrial parks.
Sustainability has become important in the operation of the global economy and its regulatory structure, leading significant shifts in the way powerful 'lead firms' in global value chains approach ...sustainability. In this paper, I argue that private, value chain-oriented forms of sustainability governance are not addressing the environmental problems they are putatively designed to solve. Through the analysis of how lead firms stimulate environmental upgrading along their value chains, I show that the mainstreaming of sustainability in business operations has allowed global buyers to accumulate 'green' profits and capital in ways that extract value from suppliers - especially those based in the global South. Drawing from analyses of the wine and coffee value chains, I show how lead firms push the hidden costs of sustainability compliance and related risks upstream towards producers. These processes have important redistributive repercussions as they raise entry barriers for smaller, less organized and/or more marginalized actors. Under the mantle of achieving environmental sustainability, lead firms in value chains stealthily capture value for themselves, while extracting more demands from their suppliers and promoting a further consolidation of their supply base. In the meanwhile, serious environmental challenges remain unaddressed.
Economic and environmental upgrading in global value chains are intertwined processes. The existing global value chain literature has so far articulated the relationships between economic and social ...upgrading but has only recently started to explore the challenges of environmental upgrading from the perspective of suppliers in the Global South. In this article, we examine the ‘factory manager dilemma’ as a way of conceptualising the purchasing practices and environmental upgrading requirements faced by suppliers in their dealings with lead firms in global value chains. Specifically, we analyse the environmental upgrading challenges experienced by Pakistani apparel firms. We conclude that Pakistani apparel suppliers are required both to absorb the consequences of global buyers’ unsustainable purchasing practices and to reduce their own profitability – all in the name of sustainability.
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