Consumers as regulators of global value chains’ conduct? A consumer-inclusive framework of change

Inadequate conduct of global value chains (GVCs) has given rise to serious concerns by academics and policymakers but efforts to improve it have made minimal progress, jeopardizing global wealth distribution and accentuating inequality. In the work, we advance a novel analytical framework for addressing this concern, underpinned by the trust of including the consumers as an important constituency that could bring about the desired change. Blending insights of governmentality, social movements, and ethical consumerism theories with those of ethical conduct in GVCs and combining them with lessons of a comparative analysis of ethical conduct in the coffee and fashion GVCs, we develop a framework for change that is driven by consumer agency and their power to ‘regulate’ global brands’ conduct via their consumption behavior. We identify a range of private- and public-sector constituencies that could mobilize the consumers towards this end and explicate the mechanisms to bring about this outcome. This framework supplements the top-down approach proposed by extant research with a bottom-up, grassroots approach. In doing this, it directs the debate regarding GVC conduct to new directions based on a different logic. The framework guides policy intervention by extending the role of governments from that of regulators of global brands to facilitators of consumers’ mobilization and societal change.