Environmental Upgrading in Pakistan's Sporting Goods Industry in Global Value Chains: A Question of Progress?

Abstract

The key objective of this paper is to examine factors which encourage or impede the environmental upgrading of Pakistani sporting goods firms in global value chains (GVCs); the sporting goods industry being one of Pakistan's main export sectors. Our research shows that buyer firms can be influential in the environmental upgrading of suppliers in GVCs due to their market power and resources. Supplier firms comply with environmental standards set by buyer firms to avoid being excluded from GVCs. However, not all GVCs provide conditions for environmental upgrading by supplier firms, since this depends very much on the type of network (governance mechanisms) in which the firms are embedded. In this paper, we explain how capable suppliers in relational networks were able to successfully embrace and implement environmental upgrading