Inter-Organisational Design of Voluntary Sustainability Initiatives: Increasing the Legitimacy of Sustainability Strategies for Supply Chains (2010)

Voluntary sustainability initiatives (VSIs) have become the most applied approach for companies to set environmental or social obligations for their supply-chains. However, companies face two main challenges in the design of VSIs: Firstly, they recognise acceptance problems by different stakeholders and opposition by competing initiatives. Secondly, they experience significant resource demands to set up VSIs and ask for more efficient solutions. Nils Peters addresses these challenges by empirically analysing the key resources and complementarities that enable companies to efficiently establish effective designs of VSIs both in terms of participants' compliance and the acceptance of initiative-external stakeholders.