The making of sustainability standards in the Global South: power, contestation, and global value chain governance

Sustainability standards are central to the governance of global value chains, shaping labour conditions and environmental practices. Yet established scholarship privileges standards originating in the Global North, creating a significant gap in understanding how sustainability governance is shaped for and within the Global South. Through a comparative analysis of standards in South African wine and Indian tea, this article shows that Southern standards are produced through relational and trans-scalar struggles embedded in uneven material power relations within and across value chains. By tracing their interaction with established Northern regimes, the article reconceptualises sustainability governance as a contested and polycentric field.