Project overview - Christian Busse & Team

Project overview

Global supply chains are multi-tiered, highly opaque, and often span diverse institutional contexts. This complexity allows sustainability problems such as human rights abuses, environmental harm, and other ethical issues to persist upstream. Adopting a multi-tiered lens on sustainability governance in supply chains, our research examines how sustainability performance erodes and how related perceptions develop across the various echelons of the supply chain. We begin our work with the critical minerals supply chain, which spans multiple tiers embedded in various institutional contexts and is notorious for opaque sourcing practices. We will employ a case-study design, combining in-depth interviews with mining firms and traders (upstream), smelters and component manufacturers (midstream), and multinational companies (downstream), with documentary evidence across the studied tiers. Interviews with other stakeholders will also be gathered.

Why does this research matter?

Our work explores a distinctive niche within the Go-Chains project by foregrounding a multi-tier supply chain perspective on sustainability governance. The empirically grounded, multi-tier governance framework that we aim to develop will offer several theoretical, societal, and practical contributions.

As our main scholarly implication, we seek to outline and explain the mechanisms that erode sustainability performance at lower-tier suppliers and contrast them with the formation of sustainability perceptions downstream.

Moreover, we seek to amplify Global South perspectives by integrating evidence from upstream actors who are often overlooked in sustainable supply chain research.

By investigating indirect, lower-tier suppliers and relevant stakeholders, we aim to provide policymakers and practitioners with a deeper understanding of the perils of opacity, thereby enhancing sustainability in multi-tiered supply chains that extend to the Global South

Please let us know who you collaborate with.

We hope to have fruitful exchange with everyone else in the project

Do you have any preliminary findings you want to share?

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