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Linking Sustainable Supply Chain Management with the Sustainable Development Goals: Indicators, Scales and Substantive Impacts

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Sustainable Development Goals and Sustainable Supply Chains in the Post-global Economy

Part of the book series: Greening of Industry Networks Studies ((GINS,volume 7))

Abstract

From the discipline of business and management studies, literature in sustainable supply chain management (SSCM), performance measurement and management (PMM), and scales, both temporal and spatial, global and post-global, provide concepts to explore how the SDGs may be met. The scalar nature of the 232 performance metrics and indicators help illustrate the opportunities for progress and challenges to overcome. The chapter builds on recent empirical work in international development and SSCM involving the use of PMM and data science to study how the SDGs can be understood and acted upon. This chapter provides a summary of this work, looking at various SDGs, their related metrics, and the business and management implications of these.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Increasing attention on the seriousness of the climate problem and its new direction of travel in the Paris Accord means that changes to trade policy have been explored, such as Border Carbon Adjustments, whereby imported goods may be taxed on the basis of the embedded carbon involved in their manufacture. This move would help defend developed country manufacturing and local markets against cheaper, overseas imports enabled by globalisation that rely on more carbon intensive energy generation (Wiedmann and Lenzen 2018). The move would be a significant shift in international trade policy.

  2. 2.

    For poorer countries, international fuel price volatility has long been guarded against by state subsidy of fuel. Some oil producing countries have offered fuel to their own people well below market rates. Such SDG indicators, subtly prompting countries to adopt free market approaches to fuel may be Trojan horses for a low carbon transition (or market liberalisation), but may also trigger unexpected blowback. One example of this occurred in Brazil in the early summer of 2018, when the shift to open market pricing for fuel led to mass protests and blockades of the roads (Financial Times 2018).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

    Anthony Alexander & Izabela Delabre

Authors
  1. Anthony Alexander
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  2. Izabela Delabre
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Correspondence to Anthony Alexander .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle University, London, UK

    Natalia Yakovleva

  2. University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK

    Regina Frei

  3. Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Sudhir Rama Murthy

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Alexander, A., Delabre, I. (2019). Linking Sustainable Supply Chain Management with the Sustainable Development Goals: Indicators, Scales and Substantive Impacts. In: Yakovleva, N., Frei, R., Rama Murthy, S. (eds) Sustainable Development Goals and Sustainable Supply Chains in the Post-global Economy. Greening of Industry Networks Studies, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15066-2_6

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