The upstream of agribusiness, which involves how raw materials are procured or where production takes place, is becoming increasingly important due to issues of social and environmental justice, as against downstream agribusiness, which relates to the purchase, use, and consumption of products as part of the product value chain (Schrempf-Stirling, Palazzo and Phillips 2013). It is not just market failures that lead to externalities—which can, therefore, be attended to with market-based systems—but it is also the ‘cost shifting’ that acts as an externality on those who are either smaller players in the chain or non-participants (Martinez-Alier et al. 2016: 732). Further, agribusiness companies working with primary producers (farmers) are driven solely by the profit motive at most times and tend to ignore the social dimensions of their operations (S. Singh 2016). Examples of such behaviour include abandoning an area if it is found to be unprofitable to continue; excluding small and marginal growers from their operations; and following the practice of ‘agribusiness normalization’, in which lower prices are offered to producers over time or prices are not raised adequately to cut down costs of procurement (Glover and Kustrer 1990: 63).

Most environmental regulations do not help in enhancing revenue; they typically increase cost and reduce the capacity of businesses to generate cash flow (Boehlje, Akridge and Downey 1995). Engaging in social responsibility is considered the key challenge for global sourcing companies and their suppliers in the developing world though it is more challenging to meet regulations. Even more problematic is the belief that if suppliers from a developing country comply with codes of conduct (CoC), it will improve the workers’ conditions and reduce environmental pollution; that is not necessarily the case as the objective conditions prevailing locally are different, for example, overtime and child labour, which are difficult to deal with. More importantly, believing that exclusion of non-complying suppliers is an effective way of securing compliance with codes or standards and, in turn, of improving the conditions of producers or workers and the environment is misplaced as such actions only harm by downgrading such producers or workers (Lund-Thomsen 2008).

Achieving environmental sustainability or upgrading, along with economic and social sustainability, is a part of the ‘triple bottom line’ or three Ps (profits, people, and planet) of corporate entities (Sindhi and Kumar 2012; Campling and Havice 2019).

INTRODUCTION

The international development agenda went on hold as countries responded to COVID-19 in 2020. The pandemic has not yet subsided as of this writing (Spring 2021), and the collateral damage may linger for years to come. Yet the COVID- 19 crisis poses both a threat and an opportunity. Regional cooperation in the post-COVID-19 era should rise to that dual challenge, helping countries to seize opportunities to advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and to devise new ways to respond to future threats.

Regionalism is a core strength of the Asia-Pacific Region (APR). Regional trade, investment and technology flows have spurred rapid economic growth and development for decades. Even in crisis, regionalism has helped shape recovery. For example, the Chiang Mai Initiative established currency swap arrangements among countries to balance payments difficulties in the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Additionally, the vulnerability of the APR to natural disasters prompted a regional response that led to a global framework for risk reduction (UN, 2015). Such examples show that regional cooperation can and should play a leading role in the post-COVID-19 era.

Moreover, the five pillars of the United Nations Framework for COVID Response envision a set of priorities requiring regional policy frameworks – one that dovetails with efforts to achieve the SDGs. Various mechanisms to achieve this already exist, as this chapter will describe, but some remain underutilized or will require the development of country- and region-level capabilities. As we will see, both pandemic response and robust, sustainable recovery require consensus about regional public goods, with health, social safety nets, financial support and digitalization informing pathways for collaboration and integration.

This chapter outlines the agenda for a post-COVID-19 regionalism. The first section recaps the initial country responses to contain the pandemic. Their largely reactive character impeded regional cooperation and limited national implementation. These containment measures require a safe but speedy unwinding for a robust regionwide economic recovery. The second section reviews the regional effort to support recovery. The various subregional responses currently underway call for sharing, harmonization and scaling-up, with technical and financial support, into a larger policy framework.

INTRODUCTION

Global challenges figure ever more prominently and in ever greater numbers on national and international policy agendas. They range from communicable disease control to climate change mitigation and from financial stability to the universalization of norms such as basic human rights. Old and new security challenges have also come up for consideration, including cybersecurity; the safe use of new technologies such as artificial intelligence; nuclear non-proliferation; terrorism control; and the prevention or cessation of war. As the recent coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic taught us once again – and perhaps more directly than ever before – many global challenges may, for better or for worse, affect all countries and all people, irrespective of whether we are rich or poor, living in the Global North or in the Global South. Challenges of this type are referred to as global public goods (GPGs). GPGs not only affect all of us directly or indirectly, but also require all of us to contribute to their adequate provision. In other words, they call for international cooperation (IC), often even universal multilateralism.

While state and nonstate actors worldwide are active contributors to GPG provision, experience shows that the sum of these contributions in many cases falls short of requirements. As a result, GPG-related problems often remain unresolved, even though their scientific and technical dimensions are well-understood, and the resources needed to resolve them are also within the bounds of what is feasible.

The question thus arises: Is the present system of multilateral cooperation not well equipped to tackle GPG-type challenges? This question has attracted the attention of world leaders. For example, in their Declaration on the Commemoration of the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the United Nations, the heads of state and government of United Nations (UN) member states emphasize that the global challenges confronting us “can only be addressed through reinvigorated multilateralism” (United Nations, 2020: para. 5). However, the Declaration does not specify how this reinvigorated multilateralism would need to differ from today's multilateral governance practices and, importantly, how it could come about. These issues will become the subject of future consultations and debates.

Introduction

This book deals with injustice in global production. Injustice means the absence of justice. Consequently, what we need to define is what constitutes global justice. The absence of the constituents of justice would then make for injustice. How do we identify the constituents of justice in global production? This book is about economic relations or politico-economic relations between actors and the outcomes they produce for gendered workers and the environment in the context of relations between suppliers and brands in what we have called global monopoly-cum-monopsony capitalism.

We define basic economic justice for gendered workers as the provision of the foundational capabilities for a dignified human life. These foundational capabilities are protected by labour standards, starting with the International Labour Organization's (ILO’s) core labour standards and extending to encompass living wages and bodily integrity. The acquisition of an input, whether labour power or environmental services, at prices below their cost of production or reproduction, constitutes a reverse subsidy that is unjust in that it deprives gendered workers of the requirements for a dignified human life and results in the deterioration of the environment. After dealing with economic justice for gendered workers, the chapter sets out the main features of environmental justice, in terms of raw material, manufacturing segments, and post-consumption waste.

In matters of justice, it is also necessary to identify actors responsible for injustice. The chapter then deals with whether we can hold brands or lead firms responsible for labour and environmental subsidies extracted at the level of supplier firms. Since brands or lead firms capture the majority of value added in the value chain, they should also be required to take major responsibility for the labour conditions in which this value is extracted. More importantly, however, brands or lead firms make choices in terms of supplier relations. They could choose to have a small number of suppliers with whom they have stable order relations, or, they could have short-term relations and unstable orders with a large number of suppliers. Their use of monopsony positions to create the latter type of short-term, unstable orders with myriad suppliers is a strategic choice. Since supplier relations are a choice rather than a compulsion, brands are directly responsible for how their terms of engagement with the suppliers impact workers and the environment in their value chains.

Everything flows, as Heraclitus used to say. Business schools and the entire socioeconomic environment alike are changing rapidly before our very eyes. Schools are preparing their graduates to enter a labor market that we know nothing about yet. We educate students to take up professions that don’t even exist, only knowing how big of a role transformation technologies are already playing. The overall atmosphere is changing, the ongoing digital transformation is gaining momentum, and the need for support not only in professional but also in more general development is getting bigger. Where is the place of management education in this landscape?

It seems trivial to note that the coronavirus epidemic has revealed the many deep cracks and dysfunctions running through the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres. It is almost frightening to see how the shockwave generated by COVID-19 affects all areas of life in society.

As our colleagues who study management have shown, purpose serves as the bedrock upon which well-aligned organizations rest. Using a less static metaphor, why we exist helps us understand how we should move forward. Typically, an organization’s purpose is institution-specific, but COVID-19 and other sustained national and global crises give rise to a sense of collective purpose. For the COVID-19 crisis, this collective purpose could be expressed as “Flatten the curve” or, in the UK, “Save lives and protect the NHS.” This collective purpose bears no resemblance to our pre–COVID-19 individual senses of organizational purpose.

As the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) celebrates 50, the world undergoes a state of deep existential crisis. Events unfold in front of our eyes that are impossible to understand for anyone born around the same time as EFMD. This state of affairs predates the current pandemic, when climate change, aging populations, data privacy, and exploding inequality, to cite a few, were already pushing institutions to the brink. We have lived through many bad and good times in the last century. But in all those times, we had theories that allowed us to understand world events and make valid predictions about how they would evolve. Even the most dramatic event of the last half century, the fall of communism, had a narrative that all could share and understand.

This book is a collective work comprising 17 chapters by the deans and leaders of important business schools from six continents.

The mission of most business schools, at least in a generic approach, has been to educate business leaders for the world. However, at the beginning of the third decade of this century, this challenge seems more complex than ever before. Some of the most renowned of these institutions aimed at training leaders of corporations that were flourishing at the end of the nineteenth or the beginning the twentieth century, in a completely different historical context. Two of the most prominent examples are Wharton Business School and Harvard Business School (HBS). The former was founded in 1881, making it the first business school established in the United States; its mission is to create leaders to change the world (Wharton, n.d.). The latter was established in 1908, and its mission is to educate leaders to make a difference in the world (HBS, n.d.).