Transparent, Sustainable Supply Chains

For Traidcraft Exchange, there is clearly a causal link between the kinds of disclosures that constitute transparency and the kinds of sustainability outcomes they are hoping to promote: namely, improving the working conditions of women in the Assam tea industry. Of the four reasons that such disclosures could be a “game-changer” for women working on Assam tea estates, the idea that transparency is a way to reward and recognize social and environmental improvements offers the clearest insight into how, exactly, such disclosures are supposed to lead to sustainable outcomes. What Traidcraft Exchange is suggesting is that companies that disclose their sources and are therefore more transparent will be able to enjoy the financial benefits of more sustainable operations. Such disclosures will allow actors including supermarkets and consumers to see the improvements tea brands have made in, for instance, their suppliers’ treatment of workers or an estate’s contribution to deforestation. They are, in corporate sustainability jargon, suggesting that there is indeed a “business case” for transparency. In this implicit causal ontology, it is the market that mediates the relationship between consumers and farmworkers (via supermarkets, tea brands, brokers, producers, estate managers, and a host of other actors that constitute global tea supply chains), and it is the market that allows consumers to express their preference for ethically sourced tea over unethically sourced tea through a process often glossed as “voting with one’s wallet.” In this worldview, if it is transparency as the disclosure of information that affords recognition, it is the market that affords the reward.

Traidcraft Exchange goes on to claim that, by pressuring companies to disclose supplier lists, its campaign transformed the supply chains that facilitate the movement of tea from farms spread across the Global South to British kitchens and cafés into exemplars of transparency, empowering both consumers and workers. It is an astonishing statement, one that helps illuminate both the relative ease with which supply chains seem to be able to be rendered transparent through the disclosure of this kind of information and the grandiose claims that are causally attached to such disclosures. How is it that the simple publication of a few Excel spreadsheets and PDF lists containing basic information about suppliers – farm names, and in some cases the location, which tea brands would have already had on hand – can be justifiably framed as leading to the empowerment of both consumers and workers? How, in other words, is transparency causally related to sustainability?

Answering this question requires an examination of the causal ontology that structures the sociotechnical imaginary of neoliberal sustainability, which is characterized by a “techno-fideistic” belief in the ability of enhanced measurement and reporting infrastructures to provide the (big) data necessary for the market to solve climate change and other socio-ecological crises for us (Archer Reference Archer2024; see also Jarrige Reference Jarrige2016; Van Dijck Reference Van Dijck2014). Put differently, we have to open the black box of transparency initiatives and try to map out the mechanisms that connect the disclosure of information about various sustainability concerns – in this case, where tea is coming from – with some desired sustainability outcome – in this case, improved treatment of women farmworkers in Assam. In doing so, it becomes clearer that “the market” mediates the relationship between transparency and sustainability because it is the market that is supposed to make sense of – and act on – the information disclosed as a result of these transparency initiatives.

Traidcraft Exchange’s assessment of the impact of its campaign – its claim that the relatively banal disclosure of vague sourcing information marked a radical transformation of the tea supply chain in terms of its transparency and that this led (somehow) to the empowerment of producers and consumers alike – reflects a broader imaginary in which practices of transparency or what Sampson (Reference Sampson, August and Osrecki2019) calls “transparenting” are framed as ethically and politically fundamental to a wide array of desirable outcomes, chief among them sustainability. For sustainability standards developers, in particular, more than fifty of whom I observed and interviewed as part of a project on the role of voluntary certification schemes in the governance of the Kenyan tea supply chain between 2018 and 2021, transparency presents different opportunities as well as different challenges. In an interview with Robert, who works in the London office of a standards development organization, it becomes clear just how much a driving force the pursuit of transparency is for market-based sustainability organizations. He tells me that it is impossible to achieve sustainability without accountability, and that accountability is impossible without transparency. That, he explains, is why there is such a strong focus on auditing and why audit reports are always public. The effectiveness of the standards his organization designs and constantly revises is premised on the idea that they are trustworthy – that is, that the certificate or label awarded to compliant producers indicates that the standard was actually followed; such trustworthiness is necessary to take advantage of the purported (but empirically suspect) consumer willingness to pay more for sustainable products. But it is not only the global tea value chain that has to be rendered legible through standardization; standards developers themselves face pressure to be transparent about their budgets and salaries, and they try to obviate criticisms leveled at organizations like the Red Cross by publishing detailed information about their finances.

Transparency is also the motivation behind the resources these organizations commit to measuring and reporting the impacts of their standards. Susanna, who works on the measurement and evaluation team for a different standards developer in London, tells me that both consumers and companies expect to be able to see the value of a standard, and, just as importantly, to see how that value was derived. It is not enough, she argues, for people who have invested in sustainability – whether it is a consumer who paid a “sustainability premium” for a certified product or a company that has gone through the motions of procuring ingredients and other inputs from certified sustainable upstream producers – to trust that the standard has done what is promised; they also expect evidence that such actions are impactful. In this sense, transparency becomes one of the easiest things to evince, since a standards development organization can easily demonstrate that a producer followed the rules regarding the disclosure of information as stipulated in a particular standard, which is itself evidence of enhanced transparency. In other words, the disclosure of specified information in a specified form can be taken as evidence both that producers complied with the standard and that the standards development organization has enhanced the transparency of the supply chain.

Critics of mainstream sustainability standards such as Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance also focus on what they see as various failures to be sufficiently transparent within these organizations, especially regarding the way their standards are developed. At a trade show for tea and coffee in Hamburg, a Madrid-based coffee importer was critical of the “secrecy” surrounding Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance. She works instead with the World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO), which she regards as open and democratic in its reliance on a set of general principles, the second of which is “Transparency and Accountability”:

A tea trader in London was critical of Fairtrade from a similar perspective, arguing that although Rainforest Alliance does not guarantee a much-needed price premium for certified tea, it is still better than Fairtrade because the latter is not transparent about the way the premiums are spent. She tells me that there is no oversight once the premiums get back to the farmers, no accountability that they will invest them as they should. Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade respond to these kinds of criticisms by aligning themselves closely with the ISEAL Alliance, an organization that provides standards and guidelines on how standards developers should go about developing standards and engaging with stakeholders, focusing in particular on the transparency of those processes. An auditor expressed similar concerns about the difference between NEPCon (since relaunched as Preferred by Nature), a popular Copenhagen-based certifier, and Africert, which has offices in Kenya, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire. In particular, he was worried about Africert’s “lack of transparency” and its effects on the integrity of the audits they conduct, although he never specified how this lack of transparency manifested or what evidence he had to suspect that Africert’s operations were in some way untrustworthy.

Transparency is a buzzword in negotiations about sustainability more generally. When I attended several business-focused and corporate-sponsored events surrounding COP 21 in Paris in 2015 as part of my dissertation fieldwork, it was all anyone seemed to be talking about. Much of my work as a participant observer in Geneva between August 2015 and August 2016 focused on sustainability professionals working in a number of organizations who were trying to figure out ways to measure, report, and evaluate their social and environmental impacts in a way that was relatively easily commensurable with their financial performance. They looked for ideally quantitative indicators of sustainability that could be correlated with corporate financial performance metrics. This was especially important for publicly traded corporations and their investors. All of this work was motivated by the recognition – sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit – that disclosing information about social and environmental impacts made a company or organization more transparent, and being more transparent was correlated with being more sustainable. The goal was to make sustainability reporting as standard and standardized as financial reporting.

Recently, the European Union has attempted to codify this by requiring companies above a certain size and in certain industries to disclose sustainability data alongside their annual financial reports. Both the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) are framed explicitly around their capacity to enable investors to make more sustainable decisions as a result of increased corporate transparency. Under the banner of the Global Compact, the United Nations has been promoting the normalization of sustainability reporting for more than a decade. Laws such as the CSRD and the CSDDD often refer to these voluntary reporting standards frameworks.

Transparency has even filtered into design choices. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, an influential organization whose membership includes some of the world’s biggest corporations, rents office space for its Geneva headquarters from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, which is located in a building made almost entirely out of glass in the shape of flower petals, a design meant to evoke, as one of the building’s junior architects told me, both transparency (with its glass walls) and sustainability (with its petal-shaped towers).

From seemingly every angle, then, transparency is a hot topic among sustainability professionals, especially those who are interested in the more social and environmentally sustainable governance of global supply chains. This reflects what Birchall (Reference Birchall2011; see also Birchall Reference Birchall2014) observes as a seemingly universal assumption that more transparency is better: that is, that more transparency is desirable, especially in the area of both public and private governance (Fung et al. Reference Fung, Graham and Weil2007) of sustainability issues (Gupta and Mason Reference Gupta and Mason2016). Hansen et al. distill three themes in critical research on transparency that complicate this narrative. First, transparency is paradoxical, as the pursuit of transparency “itself produces new dimensions of opacity and obscurity” (Reference Hansen and Flyverbom2015: 119). Second, transparency is mediated in the sense that it is “ephemeral and always in the making,” relying on various “devices, operations and proxies” in order to emerge (ibid.: 121). Finally, transparency is “part and parcel of the emergence of ‘procedural’ and ‘flexible’ modes of governance” (ibid.: 124), inextricably linked to the rapid growth of, among other things, sustainability standards (see Busch Reference Busch2011; Loconto Reference Loconto2014). More generally, transparency is premised on a model of linear communication, one in which, proponents claim, information disclosure will produce an informed and engaged public that can hold people in positions of power to account. The technological mediation that is necessarily involved in the provision of information appears as a neutral transmission belt, obscuring the power that is involved in the selection and coding of what is made visible to us and what is not (Hansen and Flyverbom Reference Hansen and Flyverbom2015: 874).

What is clear here is that transparency is about information. Indeed, most definitions of transparency see it as the disclosure of information (or some variation on that theme, such as the reporting of information), a tendency that is as true among business-friendly definitions as it is among anthropologists and other critical scholars of transparency (Albu and Flyverbom Reference Albu and Flyverbom2019; Corsín Jiménez Reference Corsín Jiménez2011; Gupta Reference Gupta2023; MacLean Reference MacLean2014). According to UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD 2004: 3), for example, “transparency denotes a state of affairs in which the participants in the investment process are able to obtain sufficient information from each other in order to make informed decisions and meet obligations and commitments.” Tarus and Omandi (Reference Tarus and Omandi2013), drawing on case studies from Kenya in an attempt to make a “business case for corporate transparency,” refer to transparency several times as the “disclosure of information” about, among other things, investment decision processes, governance strategies, risk-return profiles, and social impacts.

Even critical scholars such as Hess (Reference Hess2007) conceptually reinforce the idea that there is a relatively straightforward cause-and-effect relationship between transparency, accountability, and sustainability. What they focus their critique on instead is improving the reliability of information through, for example, the structural integration of ostensibly independent, third-party intermediaries in the disclosure process, reflecting a view of uncertainty and ambiguity as merely technical problems with technical solutions (see Best Reference Best2007). Similarly, the WFTO approach preferred by the Madrid-based coffee importer we met above falls short of questioning the idea that the proliferation of relevant information by and among various supply chain actors and other stakeholders is an inherent driver of enhanced accountability. No criticism is leveled against this causal ontology; what critics take issue with instead is simply the quality of information provided, as well as the communicative and regulatory infrastructures that facilitate the flow of information, but rarely what people are supposed to do with that information to effect any meaningful change in terms of social or environmental concerns. Gold and Heikkurinen (Reference Gold and Heikkurinen2018) refer to this as the transparency fallacy, which rests on the overly optimistic (and, in their view, wholly unwarranted) assumption that “corporate disclosure on environmental, social, and economic performance will lead to more responsible business practices as corporations are exposed to public scrutiny, and can thus be held accountable for their actions.” What they find instead is in line with much of the critical literature on transparency, which emphasizes that calls for greater transparency often facilitate business-as-usual and pre-empt challenges to the status quo through the post-political language of win–win partnerships (Garsten and Jacobsson Reference Garsten and Jacobsson2011; Mason Reference Mason2008; Moors Reference Moors2019; Sharma Reference Sharma2013).

Information as Enclosure

If transparency is the disclosure of information, it is important to think about what information is and, crucially, what it does. For the linguistic anthropologist Paul Kockelman, “any meaningful process relates [signs, objects, and interpretants] in the following way: a sign stands for its object on the one hand, and its interpretant on the other, in such a way as to make the interpretant stand in relation to the object corresponding to its own relation to the object” (Kockelman Reference Kockelman2013: 120). What this means is that meaning is less about the relationship between a sign and an object (or between a signifier and a signified in the classic Saussurean sense) and is more about the correspondence between the relationship between a sign and an object, on the one hand, and an interpretant and an object, on the other hand; Kockelman refers to this as a relation between relations. Information, then, according to Kockelman, can be understood as the “enclosure of meaning”; this means, among other things, that the meaning of a certain piece of information becomes “relatively portable: not so much independent of context, as dependent on contexts which have been engineered so as to be relatively ubiquitous, and hence seemingly context-free” (Kockelman Reference Kockelman2013: 115, emphasis added), a semiotic anti-politics machine.

Kockelman’s theory of information strikes at the heart of neoliberal sustainability in the sense that it gives us a provocative, critical vocabulary for thinking about what transparency initiatives actually do. Rather than merely prompting the disclosure of information that corporations and other actors might have otherwise preferred not to publish, these transparency initiatives force us to reckon with the causal mechanisms that link such disclosures to their purported social and environmental objectives. It pushes us, in other words, to think about the context in which such causal ontologies make sense – in which claims about the disclosure of this kind of information as meaningfully related to some sustainability outcome seems legitimate – and, crucially, about the ways in which such a context is engineered and tacitly reproduced so that sustainability can be meaningfully linked to something as trivial as publishing a list of suppliers.

When Unilever decided to release a list of farms and estates supplying tea for its brands in the UK and Ireland, it was disclosing information in a relatively specific, quantitative sense. Although there are no data about the amount of tea sourced from each location, the document includes the names of producers, the selling marks (the actual farm, estate, and/or factory where the tea is produced), and the country where the producers are located. But through the publication of this document, Unilever was also disclosing information in a more general, qualitative sense, signifying through the act of releasing a list in the first place that the company is transparent about its production while at the same time defining what actions (e.g., releasing a list of suppliers) constitute transparency. Discursively binding assessments of a company’s sustainability or social responsibility to whether or not they disclose this kind of information – that is, whether or not they are transparent – reinforces this definition of transparency while at the same time establishing sustainability as (merely) the willingness to be transparent. What Unilever hoped to signify through the disclosure of its sourcing information was that it was committed to transparency – that it was, in other words, a transparent company (or at the very least that it managed a transparent supply chain) – and it hoped that such a signification would be interpreted as evidence that it was committed to sustainability in its tea supply chain.

Traidcraft Exchange’s glowing assessment of the success of its program helped establish and reinforce this correspondence between disclosure and transparency, on the one hand, and between sustainability and transparency, on the other. By late 2020, the organization felt confident enough to publish a “principles-to-practice guide for ethical businesses.” Throughout the report, market forces offer a dynamic background against which the social and environmental impactfulness of disclosures is established. The report opens with an appeal to sustainability before immediately relating this to the private financial benefits of transparency:

The report goes on to provide details about the different business benefits of transparency, followed by a list of nine steps companies can take to improve their supply chain transparency, most of which relate to information. These steps focus, among other things, on determining why a company wants to disclose certain information and what information will be included in its disclosure; what information a company already has available and what information it needs to actively collect; and, finally, how the information should ultimately be disclosed and the kinds of reflections that should take place before starting the process over again. Such an approach to transparency suggests an obvious correspondence between transparency and sustainability, but is ambiguous regarding the causal mechanisms through which the disclosure of the kind of information the report identifies as a bare minimum is meant to lead to different sustainability outcomes, leaving implicit its advice’s fundamental reliance on the market to generate social and environmental impacts.

Transparency for the Market

Efforts to make supply chains more transparent through the disclosure of information about sourcing locations are motivated by different goals, but not, as the above suggests, by different impact imaginaries. The people working at organizations such as Traidcraft Exchange and the WFTO are working with the primary goal of improving the living and working conditions of farmers and farmworkers, and transparency is supposed to facilitate this by increasing accountability. The people working at Unilever, on the other hand, while they would certainly agree that improved working and living conditions are a worthy goal, are motivated primarily by a desire to enhance the company’s financial performance. This is clear in Unilever’s 2020 annual report, where transparency is framed variously as a way to strengthen the management team’s “dialogue” with its shareholders, as contributing to employee loyalty and retention, improving risk management, and increasing consumer confidence in the company’s products (Unilever 2021a).

How is it that transparency, understood here as the disclosure of information about sourcing, can be wielded in service of objectives as different as increasing the share price of a multinational corporation and improving the lives of marginalized farmworkers? As Michael Mason (Reference Mason2008: 12) has argued, “any analytic examination of disclosure measures in global environmental governance that fails to grasp the broader politico-economic context of transparency practices and norms is likely to lose sight of the regimes of power in play.” Reflecting on the prerogative of civil society organizations (like Traidcraft Exchange) to speak on behalf of victims (like the marginalized workers on Assam tea plantations), he urges scholars of transparency to pay attention to “the question of political representation: for whom is transparency intended? And by which standards of accountability are disclosure-based governance mechanisms to be judged?” (Mason Reference Mason2008: 11).

In trying to answer this question for the various actors discussed so far – Traidcraft Exchange and the WFTO, Unilever and the Rainforest Alliance, the European Commission, and so on – we encounter a lot of ambiguity. On the one hand, such ambiguity can be constructive, as Jacqueline Best (Reference Best2007) has shown in her critique of analyses of uncertainty that frame it as a technical problem that more and better transparency solves. What Best argues, instead, is that such “technical ambiguities” are only one kind of ambiguity, and that a focus on contested and intersubjective ambiguities highlights the inherently political nature of transparency and opacity. These latter ambiguities arise as a result of political and conceptual differences, the recognition of which, Best argues, is essential to effective governance. This seems to be what organizations like the Rainforest Alliance and Traidcraft Exchange, as well as scholars such as Tarus and Omandi (Reference Tarus and Omandi2013), are trying to do when they appeal to the economic incentives of the actors whose activities they want to govern: by making a “business case” for transparency – by, for instance, arguing that transparency increases consumer confidence and brand loyalty – they are trying to create a space in which the social and environmental goals of NGOs can be aligned with the financial goals of large, multinational corporations.

On the other hand, organization theorists have long emphasized the extent to which ambiguity can be strategically wielded (Eisenberg Reference Eisenberg1984), particularly to the extent that transparency in one area often creates useful opacities elsewhere (Birchall Reference Birchall2011; Flyverbom Reference Flyverbom2019; Schade Reference Schade2023; Stohl et al. Reference Stohl, Stohl and Leonardi2016). As Schumann (Reference Schumann2007: 839) argues in an analysis of the Welsh parliament’s vocal embrace of transparency in the late 1990s and early 2000s, “transparency practices are a strategic resource utilized by institutional actors to advance the individual and party goals of elected officials.” Thus, in asking for whom transparency is intended, it is important to examine both the divergences and the overlaps between the motivations behind a transparency initiative and, crucially, the shared assumptions underlying assessments of its (potential) impactfulness. NGOs promote data-driven transparency with consumers, investors, and activists in mind, hoping that these various actors, equipped with better information about corporate activities, will be able to hold companies accountable for their negative social and environmental impacts. Companies, on the other hand, target a similar audience of consumers and investors but in service of a very different group of people: shareholders. Despite this, the assumptions underlying the effectiveness of such initiatives are similar. It is through the dynamics of the market that the disclosure of information is supposed to lead to sustainability outcomes. The market subsumes the diverse audiences of these transparency initiatives and becomes the primary target of disclosures, the thing that is supposed to make sense of the disclosed data and improve social, environmental, and financial performance.

Conclusion

In their Introduction, the editors of this volume identify what they call the paradox of transparency, “[t]he claim that transparency is a process of mediation which incorrectly understands itself to be a process of disintermediation.” Such a paradox speaks to Kockelman’s contention that information is the enclosure of meaning to the extent that the meaning of a piece of information may appear relatively context independent but only because certain contexts have been “engineered” to be ubiquitous. From this perspective, the paradox of transparency raises several interesting questions: What information is actually disclosed through a disclosure? What does such information mean, and on what context does such meaning depend? How was such a context engineered, and which actors were involved in its construction and reproduction?

Unilever disclosed a list of its suppliers in response to Traidcraft Exchange’s “Who picked my tea?” campaign, information that was supposed to empower workers and consumers alike. For Traidcraft Exchange, the disclosure of this information rendered the tea supply chain transparent, while for Unilever these disclosures were framed as a key element in their sustainability strategy, which at the time was called the Sustainable Living Plan (Unilever 2021b). But in disclosing this information, Unilever also disclosed another type of information, information about its willingness to be “transparent,” on the one hand, and information about what kind of information it would disclose as evidence of its transparency, on the other hand. This seems like the information that really matters if we want to understand the politics of transparency, its relationship to sustainability, and the role of the market in mediating that relationship.

Paying attention to the market’s opaque but fundamental role in the causal ontologies linking transparenting practices to sustainability outcomes highlights the role of organizations like Traidcraft Exchange and the Rainforest Alliance in reinforcing the correspondence between the disclosure of relatively low-stakes information and the lofty sustainability goals such organizations claim to be pursuing. In diverse contexts – from these kinds of organizations, to the European Commission and various UN agencies, to multinational corporations and their investors – reports, guidelines, and other documents about the importance of transparency reproduce the idea that the disclosure of information about production practices leads to more sustainable outcomes, a claim that increasingly relies on the assumption that it is “the market” that causally links transparency to sustainability. As new technologies emerge that enable and mediate the rapid proliferation of information in the form of so-called big data, Aarti Gupta has called for a “radical” approach to transparency “that shines a light on the still largely hidden (from governance) drivers of unsustainability and climate harm; a transparency that pinpoints where greatest responsibility for climate action lies” (Gupta Reference Gupta2023: 3, emphasis in the original). Among other things, such an approach should include a critical focus on the organizations that are responsible for proliferating an imaginary in which the market and its corporate–financial avatars are presumed to constitute the causal mechanism through which transparency leads to sustainability, as well as the ways in which such an imaginary gets reproduced as a seemingly ubiquitous, contextualizing background against which sustainability discourses take place.