Innovation for zero-deforestation sustainable supply chain management services: a performance measurement and management approach

Purpose:

Food sector supply chains have significant negative environmental impacts, including the expansion of global food commodity production which is driving tropical deforestation - a major climate and biodiversity problem. Innovative supply chain monitoring services promise to address such impacts. Legislation also designates ‘forest-risk commodities’, demanding supply chain due diligence of their provenance. But such data alone does not produce change. We investigate how theory in performance measurement and management (PMM) can combine with sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) via case study research that addresses paradoxes of simplicity and complexity.

Method:

Given existing relevant theory but the nascent nature of the topic, theory elaboration via abductive case study research is conducted. Data collection involves interviews and participative design workshops with supply chain actors across two supply chains (coffee and soy), exploring the potential opportunities and challenges of new deforestation monitoring services for food supply chains.

Findings:

Two archetypal food supply chains structures (short food supply chains with high transparency and direct links between farmer and consumer, and complex food supply chains with highly disaggregated and opaque links) provide a dichotomy akin to the known/unknown, structured/unstructured contexts in Decision Theory (DT), enabling novel theoretical elaboration of the Performance Alignment Matrix model in PMM, resulting in implications for practice and a future research agenda.

Originality / value:

Our novel conceptual synthesis of PMM, SSCM and DT highlights the importance of context specificity in developing PMM tools for SSCM, and the challenge of achieving general solutions needed to ensure that PMM, paradoxically, is both flexible to client needs and capable of replicable application to deliver economies of scale. To advance understanding of these paradoxes, in order to develop network-level PMM systems to address deforestation impacts of food supply chains and respond to legislation, a future research agenda is presented.