From commitment to routine practice: explaining uneven sustainability implementation in multi-tier value chains

Purpose This study aims to examine why sustainability initiatives in multi-tier value chains often fail to become embedded in routine practice, despite growing investment in traceability systems, reporting routines, digital tools, supplier development and process changes. It focuses on how such initiatives become consequential in practice and develop into uneven implementation trajectories that may stabilise, drift, become diluted, or be redirected across organisational positions. Design/methodology/approach Adopting paradox theory as a sensitising lens, the study uses an abductive, episode-based qualitative design in the petrochemical sector. It identifies 43 sustainability decision episodes and reconstructs 31 of them across linked organisational positions using interviews, follow-up interviews, focus groups or workshops, and documentary and workflow artefacts. Findings Sustainability initiatives became consequential as practical triggers that disrupted existing routines, accountabilities and coordination patterns. Their effects were shaped by how actors interpreted them through concerns about practical mastery, role and accountability, coordination and relational fit, and practical legitimacy. These concerns gave rise to defensive or integrative response patterns, depending partly on the relational conditions under which implementation unfolded. Over time, these responses accumulated into four recurring implementation trajectories: drift, toggling, stabilisation and recalibration. Originality/value The paper explains uneven sustainability implementation as a process through which sustainability initiatives are interpreted and enacted across multiple organisational positions and over time. In doing so, it extends sustainable value chain research beyond structural explanations and offers a process account of why similar initiatives stall, stabilise or are revised in practice.