In recent years, various academics, consultants, companies and NGOs have advocated a move towards more cooperative approaches to private sustainability standards to address the widely identified shortcomings of the compliance paradigm. However, is it possible to address these limitations by moving towards stakeholder inclusion and capacity building while at the same time catering to the demands of lead firms supplying the mainstream market? In this article, we analyse how the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) seeks to do just that, in the process identifying three key tensions and competing policy concerns with which standard‐setters have had to grapple – (a) stakeholder inclusion vs process‐control/efficiency; (b) stringency of the standard vs scale of production; and (c) capacity building vs auditing. Combining theoretical considerations about governance in global production networks (GPNs) with a convention theory perspective, we explore these inherent tensions and show that due to pre‐existing power relations in the cotton GPN, it is hard to develop more cooperative approaches because market and industrial values tend to win out despite efforts to follow current best practice on sustainability standard‐setting.

中文翻译：

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全球生产网络中的多方利益相关者倡议：通过“更好的棉花倡议”使对可持续发展的具体理解成为现实

近年来，各种学者，顾问，公司和非政府组织都提倡朝着对私人可持续性标准采取更合作的方法迈进，以解决广泛发现的合规范式的不足。但是，是否有可能通过朝着利益相关者的包容和能力建设的方向来解决这些局限性，同时满足供应主流市场的领先企业的需求？在本文中，我们分析了“更好的棉花倡议”（BCI）如何努力做到这一点，在此过程中确定了标准制定者必须应对的三个主要紧张局势和竞争性政策关注–（a）利益相关者的包容与过程控制/效率; （b）标准对生产规模的严格程度；（c）能力建设与审计。