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The nature of world production has changed as a result of the widespread adoption of global supply chain solutions. It has helped corporations to position themselves as constructive citizens; as CSR has increased their authority and legitimacy as governance actors, companies have increasingly been embraced as the solution to problems like modern slavery and ecosystem depletion, rather than the cause of these problems. Alongside the explosion of supply chain solutions, multinational corporations have vastly increased their size, market share, and control over the global economy (Khan, 2017; Petry et al., 2021). Corporations are using this power to shape solutions in their own financial interests – ultimately, becoming richer and even more difficult to govern.

At the same time, global supply chain solutions are distracting from other key shifts; for instance, fair labour initiatives can distract from changes in the union density of a workforce, commercial dynamics that all but ensure suppliers cannot pay minimum wage, or from outsourcing practices well-documented to introduce forced labour into supply chains. Thus, notwithstanding the gains that could be made through individual supply chain solutions, there is cause for concern that the ascendance of global supply chain solutions comes with hidden costs relevant to a whole range of issues in IPE, from market volatility and economic instability of financialization and changing patterns of corporate ownership, investment and market speculation (Clapp, 2018, 2019) to the rise of artificial intelligence (Dauvergne, 2020).

By demonstrating that global supply chain solutions come with hidden costs that are often missed, we aim in this special issue to contribute to theoretical and empirical understandings of the limits of dominant forms of supply chain governance. Specifically, the issue sheds light into where and how the perverse outcome effects of global supply chain solutions occur and why. It consolidates evidence that while supply chain solutions may make gains in some issue areas, the net effectiveness of private governance as a solution to resolving the environmental and social risks and problems introduced by a self-regulatory, efficiency-driven model of global production appears to be limited (Dauvergne, 2020; Le Billon & Spiegel 2021; Ponte, 2020).

We also highlight the broader changes being spurred in the global production system and across various supply chains through the rise and proliferation of global supply chain solutions. As mentioned, our literature review finds little cause for optimism that the rise and proliferation of global supply chain solutions is making meaningful progress towards solving problems like global biodiversity loss and labour abuse (Observation 1). Yet, we see ample evidence that global supply chain solutions are not passively ineffective. Rather, as the articles by Ponte, Cutler & Lark, Fridell, and Dauvergne all illustrate in different ways, global production has entered a qualitatively different era as a result of the widespread adoption of private governance. Corporations have gained favour with governments and many NGOs as ‘champion’ citizens leading innovative, voluntary problem-solving CSR projects and initiatives. Yet, they are ultimately using this new reputational capital and authority to strategically shape rules and solutions in their own favour to guard the business status quo and expand their profitability and control.

Several articles within this special issue underscore and analyse these dynamics. Le Billon & Spiegel provide a rich comparative case analysis of the benefits and micro- and meso-level hidden costs of three types of solutions to eliminate conflict minerals, showing that the benefits legitimate corporate extractive communities while hiding the local costs to poor and marginalised workers. Through an analysis of corporate power and captured value in the global wine and coffee sectors, Ponte shows how the global supply chain ‘solution’ of environmental upgrading results in beneficial profits to large downstream lead firms while pushing the risk and compliance costs onto small upstream producers causing hidden environmental consequences. And Cutler and Lark demonstrate the privatised legal regime that has accompanied and facilitated the rise of global supply chain solutions has given corporations a new arena to exert power and evade public knowledge or scrutiny, through the rise of private arbitration solutions. In all of these cases, global supply chain solutions are clearly advantageous for business – advancing corporate power and financial goals. Yet, their benefits to environment and labour interests are uncertain and in many cases they are compromising.

The special issue highlights that the rise and proliferation of supply chain solutions is playing an important, yet under-discussed, role in stabilizing, legitimating, and reproducing contemporary capitalism (Dauvergne & LeBaron, 2014). In this sense, it is unsurprising that the actors working to conceal their hidden costs like corporations and consultants are doing so; indeed, many actors doing the ‘hiding’ have vested normative interests in assuaging societal and policymaker concerns while continuing to profit from exploitative business models. As mentioned, while many global supply chain solutions have done little to nothing to transform labour or environmental practices (see Supplementary Material), they allow consumers, activists, and policymakers to believe they are doing good and that it is possible to live ethically and resolve social and environmental problems through market behaviour and consumerism. While the proliferation of supply chain solutions hasn’t necessarily transformed the dynamics of production premised upon patterns such as poverty wages, gender-based violence, and environmental destruction, it has diverted energy and desires for a better world that in earlier eras of capitalism were targeted into contesting markets and capitalism, and incorporated these into markets themselves.

Such initiatives have also helped corporations to obtain social and political license to grow and take on a key role as central organizers of global economic activity. As such, supply chain solutions have contributed to pioneering new models of value and wealth creation and distribution, which are concentrating wealth in the hands of fewer and more powerful firms and individuals. As NGOs and civil society actors have endorsed and legitimized CSR, they have increasingly sought to transform the world with and alongside corporations, instead of by opposing corporations or calling for restrictions on their activities. The articles within this SI document the role of CSR and supply chain solutions in stabilizing and reproducing particular features of the contemporary global capitalist order, and the complicated role of civil society and NGOs within this.

For instance, Diprose et al. (2020) provide a strong in-depth empirical account of how multi-stakeholder sustainable mineral solutions in the tin sector play out on the ground in two major tin-producing Indonesian islands. The article highlights how local conditions shape and explain the benefits and hidden costs of transnational solutions, and the role of stakeholder groups in delivering or undermining global supply chain solutions. In particular, the authors argue the importance of understanding resistance and the hidden costs associated with failure to align solutions with local political economies.

Dauvergne’s article provides early warning of the hidden costs of a major emerging technological force – artificial intelligence (AI) – shaping supply chains and sustainability solutions towards business interests within the global political economy. Drawing on the SI typologies, the article highlights the importance of understanding the role and interaction of corporate power and the state in the complex relationship of micro firm-level benefits of AI solutions (e.g. clean energy and material efficiencies) to larger systemic macro-level hidden costs of AI to unsustainable outcomes (e.g. increased resource extraction and consumption).

Finally, in addition to describing and analyzing the hidden costs of global supply chain solutions, the contributions provide important analysis about the inequalities hard-wired into supply chains themselves, contributing to longstanding debates within RIPE (cf. Anner, 2020; Selwyn et al., 2020). Fridell’s contribution to this volume documents the dynamics of wealth and value creation associated with the banana supply chain and associated supply chain solutions. Through the compelling case of the astonishingly rapid total collapse of the local banana economy in St. Vincent & the Grenadines, he presents a critical challenge to dominant theoretical lenses used to understand supply chains (Fridell, 2020). He argues that these systematically overlook some of the same power dynamics that global supply chain solutions and studies of them tend to omit. The theory, he notes, is overly static and consequently, has an inherent bias towards viewing economic integration as a beneficial solution. The reality, he argues is that there is a dynamic on-the-ground interplay of hidden costs over time that includes exclusion and re-integration and that are borne by local communities and governments not global companies.