Global nuts and local mangoes: a critical reading of the UNDP Growing Sustainable Business Initiative in Kenya

This article provides a conceptual and empirical assessment of UN brokered partnerships that seek to deepen or create inclusive and sustainable agricultural supply chains in sub-Saharan Africa. More specifically it appraises the decision-making mechanisms, processes of partnership brokerage and project implementation within the UNDP Growing Sustainable Business Initiative (GSB) in Kenya. The paper argues that the lack of bottom-up participation in decision-making mechanisms and the predominantly economic imperatives driving the GSB partnership projects have failed to reach out to the partnerships’ intended beneficiaries—Kenyan small producers of nuts and mangoes. In conclusion it is suggested that opening up the GSB platform might hold the promise of reconciling sustainable business models with (some) poverty reduction

Fairtrade Facts and Fancies: What Kenyan Fairtrade Tea Tells Us about Business’ Role as Development Agent

Various promising claims have been made that business can help alleviate poverty, and can do so in ways that add value to the bottom line. This article begins by highlighting that the evidence for such claims is not especially strong, particularly if business is thought of as a development agent, i.e. an organization that consciously and accountably contributes towards pro-poor outcomes. It goes on to ask whether, if we did know more about either the business case or the poverty alleviation case, would this give cause for greater optimism that business could make a significant contribution to development. By exploring the experiences of producers of Fairtrade tea in Kenya, we reveal the complex nature of what constitutes a beneficial outcome for the poor and marginalized, and the gap that can exist between ethical intentions and the experience of their intended beneficiaries. The lessons of these experiences are relevant for Fairtrade and any commercial initiative that seeks to achieve outcomes beneficial and recognizable to the poor, and raise questions about the integration of social and instrumental outcomes that a future generation of ethical entrepreneurship will need to address

Battlefields of ideas: changing narratives and power dynamics in private standards in global agricultural value chains

The rise of private standards, including those involving multi-stakeholder processes, raises questions about whose interests are served and the kind of power that is exerted to maintain these interests. This paper critically examines the battle for ideas—the way competing factions assert their own narratives about value chain relations, the role of standards and related multi-stakeholder processes. Drawing on empirical research on the horticulture and floriculture value chains linking Kenya and the United Kingdom, the analysis explores the framing of sustainability issues, especially around labor issues and good agricultural practice, and the choice of response with respect to private standards and multi-stakeholder initiatives since the late 1990s. We identify four competing narratives currently in play: a dominant global sourcing narrative, a pragmatic development narrative, a broader development narrative and a narrative we term potentially transformative. This last narrative is currently emerging through the unpacking of narratives in relation to the framing of sustainability problems and solutions, and in terms of legislative, executive and judicial governance. The paper contributes to emerging understanding of power in value chains, moving beyond material power to a consideration of how ideational power is exerted and resisted

Arbitrating Risk through Moral Values: The Case of Kenyan Fair Trade’, in Hidden Hands in the Market: Ethnographies of Fair Trade, Ethical Consumption, and Corporate Social Responsibility

This chapter examines the Kenyan Fairtrade flower as a site of value making, one that provides a constructive lens into how moral obligation and ethical accountability are shaped by risk perceptions and become visible through the process of transnational commodity exchange. Specifically, it argues that while Fairtrade labeling responds to the risks of corporate capitalism through consumption practices predicated on extending care and compassion to distant communities, it is also embedded within commodity chains that advance liberal ethics as a mode of “governmentality” over African producers. These ethics are associated with new technologies of information gathering, regulation, and surveillance that simultaneously assuage consumers’ anxieties and channel their sympathy-based humanism into new forms of ethical normativity. Fairtrade's relational ethic, for example, is accompanied by a private regulatory assemblage that authorizes certain knowledge forms, thereby circumscribing the social and economic rights available as well as the form of personhood through which they can be claimed. Thus, although Fairtrade is cast as morally unproblematic, it can also serve as a mechanism through which specific interests are naturalized and circulated through a benevolent vernacular of economic and social rights

Responsible Retailing: The Practice of CSR in Banana Plantations in Costa Rica

corporate social responsibility, Costa Rica, global supply chains, labour codes of conduct, supermarkets, banana transnational producers,