Tapping into the transformative potential of sustainability : the emergence of sustainable rubber initiatives among Vietnamese agribusinesses

Agricultural conversion is the top driver of tropical deforestation and multiple associated socio-ecological crises, from biodiversity loss to land dispossession and livelihood precarity. Against this backdrop, this thesis examines the sustainability efforts of Vietnamese rubber companies operating in southern Laos. Drawing from an empirically grounded study using qualitative methodologies, it interrogates how upstream primary producer companies are responding to emerging sustainability governance initiatives. Bringing political ecology into conversation with global production network analysis, the thesis argues that sustainability has become an all-encompassing response to market pressures and past controversies of plantation expansion led by Vietnamese companies. From above, sustainability enables companies to secure market access, protect brand reputation, and respond to customer demands. From below, it helps companies manage relationships with villagers, workers, smallholders, and lower-level government officials in order to secure social license to operate across contested production landscapes. The thesis shows that Vietnamese rubber companies are not merely passive recipients of external sustainability pressures. They demonstrate agency and initiative by making deep structural transformations in their organization, policy priorities, and production practices, even if these are aimed at showing compliance around certification or due diligence regulations, but especially through their internal voluntary initiatives. Yet these actions enter a landscape already shaped by uneven power relations in southern Laos. Companies’ compliance with sustainability instruments prioritizing traceability and documentation risk further excluding smallholder rubber producers from a pre-existing bifurcated supply chain. In this context, large-scale Vietnamese rubber companies wield significant power over the production landscape of southern Laos, especially through their ability to control and distinguish their own legible and traceable supply chains from smallholder-dominated production networks. Rather than treating company-led sustainability efforts as simple greenwashing, this thesis highlights its transformative potential: corporate sustainability may reproduce existing inequalities, but it may also open new possibilities if it confronts the unequal relations that undergird rubber production. The case of how Vietnamese rubber companies are navigating and responding to overlapping pressures, regulations, and incentives shows how commodity producers in the Global South may meaningfully participate in global environmental governance – not simply as compliant suppliers, but as actors capable of reshaping sustainability agendas.