Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons^™

National Contexts Matter: The Co-Evolution Of Sustainability Standards In Global Value Chains, Stephan Manning, Frank Boons, Oliver Von Hagen, Juliane Reinecke

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

In this paper, we investigate the role of key industry and other stakeholders and their embeddedness in particular national contexts in driving the proliferation and co-evolution of sustainability standards, based on the case of the global coffee industry. We find that institutional conditions and market opportunity structures in consuming countries have been important sources of standards variation, for example in the cases of Fairtrade, UTZ Certified and the Common Code for the Coffee Community (4C). In turn, supplier structures in producing countries as well as their linkages with traders and buyers targeting particular consuming countries have been key mechanisms of …