Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the social, political and economic impacts of value chains as the infrastructure through which corporate sustainability programs are conceived and implemented; it is based on ten months of fieldwork in Geneva, Switzerland, among corporate sustainability practitioners.

Paper long abstract:

Value chains have become the infrastructure through which so-called corporate sustainability initiatives are organized and implemented. Here, the word "infrastructure" is employed in multiple ways (cf. Kockelman 2010; 2012): in the colloquial sense that refers to roads or sewers that generally exist in the background but nevertheless facilitate a lot of human activity and explode into view when they malfunction; in a broader sense as the networks or assemblages that facilitate traditionally understood semiotic processes like value ascription and discourse; and in the broadest sense as any kind of 'relations between relations' that generate meaning.

With this in mind, this paper examines the increasingly central role of value chains (both real and imagined) in the conception and implementation of climate change mitigation projects and policies, focusing in particular on the so-called business case for sustainability and the "triple-bottom-line" principle that underlies it. It discusses the commodification of sustainability via market-based approaches and explores the affective and material foundations of corporate sustainability narratives. This research is based on 10 months of fieldwork with a Swiss sustainability consultancy and attendance at numerous sustainability and climate change conferences aimed at private companies, as well as interviews and participant observation with corporate actors, NGOs, activists and policymakers. The "value chain" as the emergent form of neoliberal organization is shown to provide a useful way to (re)conceptualize infrastructure and to examine its role in global processes like climate change, but also development, public health and migration.