Sustainability standards at the global coffee market

The Emergence of a Standards Market: Multiplicity of Sustainability Standards in the Global Coffee Industry

The growing number of voluntary standards for governing transnational arenas is presenting standards organizations with a problem. While claiming that they are pursuing shared, overarching objectives, at the same time, they are promoting their own respective standards that are increasingly similar. By developing the notion of ‘standards markets,’ this paper examines this tension and studies how...

Standards and Sustainability in the Coffee Sector

How Can High-Biodiversity Coffee Make It to the Mainstream Market? The Performativity of Voluntary Sustainability Standards and Outcomes for Coffee Diversification

This article investigates the outcomes of mainstream coffee voluntary sustainability standards for high-biodiversity coffee diversification. By viewing voluntary sustainability standards certifications as performative marketing tools, we address the question of how such certification schemes affect coffee value creation based on unique biodiversity conservation properties in coffee farming. To ...

Sensing Reality? New Monitoring Technologies for Global Sustainability Standards

In the 1990s, civil society organizations partnered with business to ‘green’ global supply chains by setting up formal sustainability standard-setting organizations (SSOs) in sectors like organic food, fair trade, forestry and fisheries. While SSOs have withstood the long-standing allegations that they are unnecessary, costly, non-democratic and trade-distorting, they must now respond to a new ...

Do Corporate Global Environmental Standards Create or Destroy Market Value

Glen Dowell • Stuart Hart • Bernard Yeung 263 College of Business, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599 New York University, Stern School of Business, 44 W 4th Street, Room 7/65, New York, New York 10012, and William Davidson Institute, University of Michigan Business School, Ann Arbor,...