Multisectoral Governance for Sustainability in Global Supply Chains

Sustainability poses a challenging goal for multinational enterprises that encompasses their activities within global supply chains. By exerting their bargaining power, multinational enterprises may require their suppliers to conform to their private codes of conduct. Additionally, multinational enterprises and their suppliers may be engaged in standard-setting partnerships with social actors. At the same time, their supply operations are scattered across institutional contexts strongly influenced by public policy and cultural factors. In describing the multifaceted sources of power and authority along the global supply chains, extant studies usually focus on a single sector of governance – i.e., public, social, or private - or, at most, the combination of two sectors of governance (for example, private and social). Sometimes, such studies separately analyze specific governance mechanisms, formal or informal. In this paper, we summarize previous literature and develop a framework that: (a) simultaneously considers public, social, and private governance sectors; (b) unveils the interplay between formal and informal governance mechanisms for each governance sector, and; (c) illustrates the multiple interactions among the public, social, and private governance sectors. After discussing the implications for theory and future research stemming from our framework, we identify practical insights for managers and policymakers.