Call for papers - Varieties of Southern Sustainability Initiatives: Exploring Conflict and Collaboration in Value Chains and Beyond

[Philip Schleifer]

Dear colleagues,                  

From 22-24 June 2022, Wageningen University and Research will host the 8th biennial International Symposium on Cross-Sector Social Interactions (CSSI 2022). The theme of CSSI 2022 will be “Partnering for Resilience and Transformation”. The symposium will be largely online, with a number of live plenaries and in-person dialogues broadcasted from the Wageningen Dialogue Center.

During this event, we are organizing a panel titled “Varieties of Southern Sustainability Initiatives: Exploring Conflict and Collaboration in Value Chains and Beyond”. Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) have increasingly gained importance in addressing sustainability challenges in global value chains. The pre-eminence of such global governance initiatives in the public debate and academic research largely obscures the emergence of a variety of ‘Southern’ sustainability initiatives, which started in the early 2000s and has gained momentum over the past few years. Partially, Southern initiatives have been explicitly created in response to controversies around global MSIs, including a sense of exclusion and power imbalances marginalizing Southern interests and questions on context-specific relevance. While Southern sustainability initiatives are on the rise and have been identified as important trends in sustainability governance, we still know relatively little about them. Therefore, this panel aims to open up the debate about their functioning and their ability to mitigate sustainability challenges. Please find the full call for papers here:  https://www.wur.nl/en/Research-Results/Chair-groups/Social-Sciences/CSSI-Partnerships-Conference-2022/Call-for-papers/Panel-12.-Varieties-of-Southern-Sustainability-Initiatives-Exploring-Conflict-and-Collaboration-in-Value-Chains-and-Beyond.htm

Interested contributors are invited to submit an abstract to our panel before January 31, 2022. Abstracts should be around 1000 words in length. All submissions should be made through the CSSI 2022 Symposium website: https://www.wur.nl/en/Research-Results/Chair-groups/Social-Sciences/CSSI-Partnerships-Conference-2022/Submit-an-abstract.htm

Warm regards,

Philip Schleifer, Greetje Schouten, and Verena Bitzer