Sustainability initiatives have proliferated in many industries in recent years. This has led to a plethora of standards that exist in parallel to each other seeking to address more or less the same social and environmental issues. Sustainability standards are not neutral tools but institutional...

Since the mid-1990s a range of Southern social standard initiatives have emerged, including in the African horticultural industry. In this paper I analyse two Kenyan standard initiatives in the cut flower sector - a business initiative and a multistakeholder initiative. I investigate how...

This paper provides a case study of the Ethiopian flower export industry which successfully emerged at time when the EU market (main destination) was already characterized by increasingly stringent standards and delivery requirements. Entering this market required a multitude of capabilities at...