Since publication of the Brundtland Report in 1987, the notion of sustainable development has come to guide the pursuit of environmental reform by both public and private organizations and to facilitate communication among actors from different societal spheres. It is customary to characterize sustainable development in a familiar typology comprising three pillars: environmental, economic, and social. The relationships among these dimensions are generally assumed to be compatible and mutually supportive. However, previous research has found that when policy makers endorse sustainable development, the social dimension garners less attention and is particularly difficult to realize and operationalize. Recent years though have seen notable efforts among standard setters, planners, and practitioners in various sectors to address the often neglected social aspects of sustainability. Likewise, during the past decade, there have been efforts to develop theoretical frameworks to define and study social sustainability and to empirically investigate it in relation to “sustainability projects,” “sustainability practice,” and “sustainability initiatives.” This introductory article presents the topic and explains some of the challenges of incorporating social sustainability into a broad framework of sustainable development. Also considered is the potential of the social sustainability concept for sustainability projects and planning. This analysis is predicated on the work represented in this special issue and on related initiatives that explicitly discuss the social pillar of sustainable development and its relationship to the other dimensions.

Continued unsustainability and surpassed planetary boundaries require not only scientific and technological advances, but deep and enduring social and cultural changes. The purpose of this article is to contribute a theoretical approach to understand conditions and constraints for societal change towards sustainable development. In order to break with unsustainable norms, habits, practices, and structures, there is a need for learning for transformation, not only adaption. Based on a critical literature review within the field of learning for sustainable development, our approach is a development of the concept of transformative learning, by integrating three additional dimensions—Institutional Structures, Social Practices, and Conflict Perspectives. This approach acknowledges conflicts on macro, meso, and micro levels, as well as structural and cultural constraints. It contends that transformative learning is processual, interactional, long-term, and cumbersome. It takes place within existing institutions and social practices, while also transcending them. The article adopts an interdisciplinary social science perspective that acknowledges the importance of transformative learning in order for communities, organizations, and individuals to be able to deal with global sustainability problems, acknowledging the societal and personal conflicts involved in such transformation.

This paper introduces the Special Volume on sustainable and responsible supply chain governance. As globalized supply chains cross multiple regulatory borders, the firms involved in these chains come under increasing pressure from consumers, NGOs and governments to accept responsibility for social and environmental matters beyond their immediate organizational boundaries. Governance arrangements for global supply chains are therefore increasingly faced with sustainability requirements of production and consumption. Our primary objectives for this introductory paper are to explore the governance challenges that globalized supply chains and networks face in becoming sustainable and responsible, and thence to identify opportunities for promoting sustainable and responsible governance. In doing so, we draw on 16 articles published in this Special Volume of the Journal of Cleaner Production as well as upon the broader sustainable supply chain governance literature. We argue that the border-crossing nature of global supply chains comes with six major challenges (or gaps) in sustainability governance and that firms and others attempt to address these using a range of tools including eco-labels, codes of conduct, auditing procedures, product information systems, procurement guidelines, and eco-branding. However, these tools are not sufficient, by themselves, to bridge the geographical, informational, communication, compliance, power and legitimacy gaps that challenge sustainable global chains. What else is required? The articles in this Special Volume suggest that coalition and institution building on a broader scale is essential through, for example, the development of inclusive multi-stakeholder coalitions; flexibility to adapt global governance arrangements to local social and ecological contexts of production and consumption; supplementing effective monitoring and enforcement mechanisms with education and other programs to build compliance capacity; and integration of reflexive learning to improve governance arrangements over time

We have seen a worldwide increase in new nonstate, multi-stakeholder organizations setting standards for socially and environmentally responsible behavior. These standard-setting arenas offer new channels for political participation for NGOs. Scholars have drawn attention to the rise and the role of NGOs in global politics, but there is less research on the power and long-term implications of NGO participation in transnational multi-stakeholder standard-setting. This article analyzes NGOs within three such global organizations: the Forest Stewardship Council, the Marine Stewardship Council, and the International Organization for Standardization on Social Responsibility. Using a power-based perspective, we demonstrate the impact that NGOs can have on multi-stakeholder work. In doing so, we analyze four types of NGO power: symbolic, cognitive, social, and monitoring power. The article further emphasizes institutional, structural, and discursive factors within multi-stakeholder organizations that create certain challenges to NGO power and participation in the longer term.