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

The rising share of farm work in India undertaken by women – a phenomenon commonly referred to as the feminization of agriculture – raises questions about the changing character of rural India, particularly with regards to women's social and economic roles. Based on an analysis of four sets of occupational data drawn from the Indian Census (1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011), this paper demonstrates that, as a process driven largely by the outmigration of men from rural areas, the feminization of agriculture has no necessary relationship with wider INDICATORS of women's social or economic empowerment. Instead, women's growing participation in agriculture appears to be strongly related to several indicators of poverty. This paper concludes that women's growing contribution of labour in agriculture adds to the already heavy work burdens of most rural women, thereby further undermining their well-being, and suggests that the feminization of agriculture may better be described as the feminization of agrarian distress.

Mining activities in Australia tend to be cyclical, with boom and bust times impacting upon associated communities. However, little information exists to classify key impacts or to identify how they vary across mining service towns. In this paper, qualitative social impact assessment techniques have been used to independently assess post-development impacts of mining on six communities in the Bowen Basin in Queensland, following the boom in coal prices between 2003 and 2008. The communities are similar in that they all have at least one mine in the vicinity and have more male than female residents but they differ in town histories, and the size plus growth rate of both their permanent and temporary populations. While the mining boom has been generating social and economic impacts, the pattern of the impacts appears to vary across communities depending on the size of the impact, community structure and history, and the extent to which a non-resident workforce is involved.