Scaling-up’ corporate accountability in global commodity supply chains? Exploring the implications for accountability of the ‘sector transformation’ agenda

This paper explores potential pathways through which foreign corporate accountability might be strengthened via interactions between global sustainability certification schemes and producing country governments that emerge as part of efforts to promote sectoral or jurisdictional sustainability transformations. Drawing on empirical analysis of several prominent ‘sector transformation’ initiatives involving private sustainability regulators in mining and agribusiness supply chains, the paper theorises and illustrates the processes through which corporate power and accountability are contested at multiple scales. As means of strengthening transnational corporate accountability for social and environmental impacts, these initiatives are shown to have complex and contradictory effects. On the one hand, they can open up new pathways of corporate accountability through strengthened performance-based accountability and responsiveness to international sustainability standards. On the other hand, they tend to reproduce the structural power of business in global markets and commodity producing nations, and to privilege accountability to established powerholders such as international donors, international companies, national business associations and host country governments, while marginalizing mechanisms of direct accountability to marginalized workers or producers. The ultimate effects of such interacting pressures are shown to depend not only on prevailing configurations of social and economic power in particular sectors and jurisdictions, but also on the path-dependent evolution and mobilization of corporate accountability discourses and coalitions at local and global scales.