Supply chain sustainability is often treated as a risk to manage. What if it were treated as a capability to develop together? Within sustainable supply chain management, sustainable supplier development (SSD) is emerging as a valuable and collaborative alternative to monitoring and compliance alone.

My doctoral research, funded by the Knowledge Foundation within the ENSURE research project, takes a transdisciplinary approach to studying how firms can co-design and govern SSD across buyer-supplier dyads. Through a multiple case study design with a cohort of manufacturing firms, I study how SSD practices such as knowledge exchange and joint development of sustainable innovation can strengthen upstream supply chain sustainability.

I aim to develop an empirically grounded framework describing various sustainability maturity levels and strategic pathways for capability development, supporting firms in their transition towards more collaborative approaches to upstream supply chain sustainability.