When it comes to global supply chains and sustainability, do audits work? Are audits that effective? In this article, the authors draw attention to key tensions and show how power plays out along the way to block meaningful change.
Check out the abstract below, and then click through to the main article to learn more:
Governing Global Supply Chain Sustainability through the Ethical Audit Regime
Peer-reviewed research by: Genevieve LeBaron, Jane Lister and Peter Dauvergne
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.
Click here to read the full open-access article, published in 2017 in the journal Globalizations
Full Reference //
LeBaron, G. Lister, J. & Dauvergne, P. (2017) Governing Global Supply Chain Sustainability through the Ethical Audit Regime, Globalizations, 14:6, 958-975.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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