Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: The Role of Supermarkets as Key Agents in Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production

Michigan State University, East Lansing MI

Investigators

Abstract

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries. The teams will develop and employ new transdisciplinary approaches to address sustainable consumption and production as a socio-technical system to help inform decision-making for sustainable, resilient, and just systems of consumption and production. The project focuses on the highly influential role that supermarkets play in the shift towards Systems of Sustainable Consumption and Production (SSCP). These entities impose standards on their suppliers and shape consumer behavior - for good or bad. Sustainability behavior of supermarket chains differs considerably across sustainability dimensions, business models, and countries. This project links the observed sustainability patterns to the business rationale of firms to understand why corporate sustainability profiles differ so strongly across retail corporations, to gain insight on corporate decision-making and to help explain strategic differences. The project investigates decision-making through an innovative analytical framework integrating management science, value chain research, and socio-technical systems research and several methodological approaches including business management research, consumer behavioral economics, and environmental impact analysis. This project will increase the knowledge of policymakers, civil society organizations, private sector associations, and consumer groups about what are the current actions, opportunities, and challenges for supermarket chains to increase the sustainability of their food products and services. This knowledge will help design better sustainability strategies, and products and processes, directly benefitting consumers and the environment by tracking and monitoring the environmental footprint of food retailers’ sourcing and marketing actions in their societies and build long term partnerships to sustain change. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.