SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGIES AND GREENWASHING ALONG FOOD VALUE CHAINS: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE DETERMINANTS

The food system is vital in sustaining livelihoods on the planet, but it also entails major impacts in terms of environmental and social sustainability. In order to address the sustainability-related challenges, companies have been increasingly taking an active role in promoting sustainability, by adopting voluntary sustainability standards (VSS). Companies may not be necessarily truthful when communicating their sustainability activities, and this trend has given rise to greenwashing. To enhance sustainability, it is crucial to identify which variables promote or hinder sustainability strategies adoption and greenwashing behaviour. In our analysis, an integrated theoretical framework is developed by combining Stakeholder theory, GVC theory and Risk dependence theory to explain sustainability strategies adoption, and the focus is on the role of firm characteristics. Three samples of companies operating along different agri-food value chains were selected, and three original datasets were created by combining data from the Orbis database and from a content analysis carried out on company websites. In Chapter 1, I explore the firm characteristics which shape the pattern of sustainability strategies adoption in the cocoa-chocolate global value chain (GVC), by collecting data over a sample of 304 cocoa-chocolate companies. In Chapter 2, I assess the relationship between firm characteristics and the communication of environmental VSS in the European beef value chain. In Chapter 3, I analyse the extent to which firm characteristics relate to greenwash behaviour in the value chains of five different agri-food products, namely coconut, coffee, processed tomatoes, shrimps, soft drinks and tea. A tailored empirical strategy was developed for each chapter, and a different regression model was employed based on the characteristics and distribution of the dependent variables. The thesis demonstrates that a vast proportion of companies do not communicate any sustainability activity. Moreover, our findings suggest that highly visible, close to consumer agri-food firms are likely to make efforts to achieve sustainability. However, they are simultaneously more inclined to disclose misleading sustainability claims and engage in a greenwashing behaviour. Therefore, results imply that stronger efforts are needed to meet the SDGs set by the UN Agenda 2030.