Cross-national public acceptance of sustainable global supply chain policy instruments

Abstract

Despite increasing their consumption footprints, high-income countries have improved domestic environmental and labour conditions. This incongruity is enabled by international trade, dissociating consumption benefits from adverse production impacts. However, political debates on new regulation to make environmental and labour practices more sustainable throughout companies' global supply chains have emerged in the Global North. While shifting public sentiment towards regulating global business practices could place sustainability on the policy agenda forefront, citizen support for such policies remains under-identified. Here we explore dimensions of citizen support for global supply chain regulations via survey-embedded experiments. We find that citizens prefer strong reporting requirements and enforcement capabilities across the 12 largest OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) importing countries (N = 24,003). Further, such policy preferences are driven by environmental attitudes and political ideology, and are robust against pro-/anti-market informational manipulation. These results suggest substantial, cross-national public opinion mandates for policy interventions to make global supply chains more transparent. From a sustainability perspective, this is an a priori encouraging finding as it implies that over the last decade, public opinion on this emerging policy topic has matured. Consequently, political actors have an incentive to situate the subject prominently on their policy programmes.