Chasing promises of progress: control, consent and the proliferation of counting and accounting in a sustainable cocoa supply chain

In the Global North, attention for the sustainability of globally-sourced goods is rising on the agendas of both lawmakers and consumers. Worries over the environmental and human cost of commodities go hand in hand with the concern to quantify, measure and certify sustainability, efforts that do not take place spontaneously but require extensive governance. As a consequence, mechanisms of control driven and coordinated by lead firm management reverberate throughout global value chains, in a bid to create both the sustainable goods, and the data, markets and governments require. Our study aims to explore what this means for the workers implicated in these sustainable supply chains. The present article is based on a three-year case study of a cocoa supply chain. By following the idea of sustainability and transparency from the European chocolate manufacturer and its importing supplier, through a cocoa cooperative, to the very farmers harvesting the cocoa beans, we elaborate a multi-sited ethnography of quantification in sustainable supply chains. Using a labour process theory approach, we show how workers throughout different countries and across organizations are impacted by their implication in sustainable supply chain governance. We highlight the production of new forms of workers’ consent as a crucial factor in the generation of sustainability stories and data, vital to current notions of sustainable trade. As sustainability regulations proliferate, our article responds to an urgent need for deeper reflection on what these will mean for workers, and how they will feed into broader global inequalities.