The study of transnational sustainability governance is, as Charles Roger and Peter Dauvergne write, becoming increasingly “theoretically innovative, methodologically rigorous, and speaks to the concerns that are central to the larger field of IR” (“The Rise of Transnational Governance as a Field of Study,” International Studies Review, 18 [3], 415, 2016)—and, I would add, to political science broadly. Scholars focusing on sustainability arrangements for businesses in global supply chains, building on the work of early pioneers like Virginia Haufler, Ben Cashore, Bas Arts, and Tim Bartley, have shaped an academic field that is theoretically and methodologically pluralist where research findings can inform both policy-making efforts to improve existing policy instruments and efforts at questioning and critiquing them, and where engagement with one another’s work is not siloed according to particular theoretical, political, or philosophical commitments.

Recently, the field has been enriched by a number of new book-length studies, including work by Hamish van der Ven (Beyond Greenwash: Explaining Credibility in Transnational Eco-Labeling, 2019), Stefano Ponte (Business, Power and Sustainability in a World of Global Value Chains, 2019), Genevieve LeBaron (Combatting Modern Slavery: Why Labour Governance Is Failing and What We Can Do about It, 2020), and Stefan Renckens (Private Governance and Public Authority: Regulating Sustainability in a Global Economy, 2020). Janina Grabs’s new book, Selling Sustainability Short? The Private Governance of Labor and the Environment in the Coffee Sector, is a particularly notable contribution to the burgeoning scholarly literature. Grabs sets out to study the million-dollar questions for anyone interested in private sustainability standards in global supply chains: Do these standards work? For what purpose do they exist, and do they achieve what they are after?

These questions can be unpacked in various ways; for instance, with an eye on the characteristics of standards; the business uptake of these standards; the impacts of implementation efforts on producer sites such as farms, plants, factories, and forests; and the degree to which standards transform behavior of and interactions among buyers, producers, and traders in supply chains. The great thing about Grabs’s book is how it integrates various of these dimensions of “private governance effectiveness” into one coherent, mixed-methods study of sustainability standards in the coffee sector.

Grabs finds that voluntary sustainability efforts have over the past decades oscillated between two models for improving labor and environmental conditions in coffee production. In one model, sustainability-standard organizations act as regulators, determining which economic actors are compliant with standards, including ambitious redistributive and environmental protection norms, and offer economic benefits specifically to firms upholding such norms. In the other model, organizations act as partners for economic actors in a collective, industry-wide effort at continuous improvement that is mostly focused on productivity-enhancing aspects of sustainability. In Grabs’s reading, the latter model now predominates. This results in lower effectiveness of these standards overall and more generally leads to a lack of incentives among supply chain actors to seriously address labor and environmental issues.

Grabs’s book convincingly combines a meticulous comparison of standards with a process-oriented focus on the behavior of various agents in the coffee chain, as well as an outcome-oriented focus on what happens on farms in Honduras, Colombia, and Costa Rica involved in sustainability standard-setting efforts. Her work also engages with the interactions between private regulatory efforts and existing domestic policies and regulations in the three case countries. Additionally, it highlights interactions among various coffee-oriented standard organizations. She shows that, rather than dividing the market between more ambitious, “regulatory-oriented” standards focused on a niche market, and a “improvement-oriented” mainstream segment, more stringent standard organizations are actually being pulled toward lower problem-solving effectiveness. A final strength worth mentioning is that the book illuminates how dynamic the world of transnational sustainability governance is, with organizational forms, policy objectives, problem definitions, and theories of change undergoing constant transformation.

Two remarks are in order about the book’s ambition to speak to the present and future of transnational sustainability governance in supply chains more broadly. These are not necessarily criticisms of the book but can be taken as pointers for readers who might be tempted to take the lessons of this book as generalizable across commodities, sectors, and regions of the global economy.

First, the book, in line with its rational-choice–inspired framework, emphasizes price premiums as incentives for sustainable change at the producer level and argues how failures to pay such premiums decrease standards’ effectiveness. Although price premiums are relevant for the coffee sector, it is clear that they are not a major feature of sustainability standard-setting policies in many other sectors, nor are there prominent sales arguments for businesses to engage with such standards. The diagnosis of unmet expectations with regard to premiums to me seems more characteristic of coffee than a failure of sustainability standard-setting overall.

Second, the book’s focus on nongovernmental actors in promoting labor and environmental goals means that it, by design, cannot do full justice to what is happening (inter-)governmentally with regard to emerging policies and regulations in global supply chains (and to which LeBaron, Ponte, and Renckens devote more attention). Less attentive readers may therefore be left with an impression that sustainability advances in coffee and beyond will remain a business + NGO game. But the new wave of initiatives and laws that take the United Nations framework for business due diligence, with human rights as the starting point, are especially likely to affect the processes and outcomes detailed in this book; for instance, when addressing issues like child labor and worker safety (for example, Claire Bright et al., “Toward a Corporate Duty for Lead Companies to Respect Human Rights in their Global Value Chains?” Business and Politics 22 [ 4], 2020). Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere (Luc Fransen, “Beyond Regulatory Governance? On the Evolutionary Trajectory of Transnational Private Sustainability Governance,” Ecological Economics 146, 2018), the emergence of governmental and intergovernmental rules for global supply chains means that private sustainability-standard organizations are likely pulled into different directions when it comes to their role in addressing social and environmental issues in the future: toward developmental, partnering, continuous improvement-oriented work as analyzed so well in Grabs’s book or toward work as intermediary agents in implementing public supply chain regulations.

Overall, I recommend this great book without any reservation to anyone interested in voluntary business practices toward sustainable goals—in coffee and beyond. It is theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich and is likely to inspire new ideas and conversations about the path toward more labor and environmentally friendly production.