Inter-firm collaboration has been considered a central element of sustainable supply networks. It involves a complex dynamic process in which actors engage in synergistic activities such as joint technological innovation or dissemination of sustainability strategies to reduce environmental impacts as a whole along the entire supply chain. To enhance environmental performance of a supply network through collaboration, it is important to improve our understanding about what drives and determines collaborative activities. The sustainable supply chain literature highlights various enablers of collaboration activities, including stakeholder pressure, pressure from a buyer, the role of external agents (e.g., consultants, trainers, and brokers), changes in legislation, and risk-sharing.
Our study examined two cases of inter-firm collaboration in a sustainable supply chain initiative in Colombia (called RedES-CAR), with the intention to find what drove and influenced the emergence of such collaborations. The RedES-CAR program was initiated in 2013, with the objective to promote environmental improvements by disseminating cleaner production practices throughout the participating companies’ supply networks. The initiative brings together academia, industry, and government. Participating companies are required to design projects aiming to improve their environmental performance. We conducted semi-structured interviews with the companies to explore overall processes and influencing factors.
We found that external agents who led the workshops and assisted the company’s development of cleaner production projects had little influence on the development of collaborative projects, which led to the rejection of our initial hypotheses. Instead, we observed the following characteristics in the two cases of collaboration:
- Companies engaged in collaboration activities have had long-term relationships with their collaboration partners (which reflects the trust they have built with time and is required for collaboration to emerge).
- In both cases, companies that agreed to cooperate with those who proposed the project did not mention a particular economic benefit. However, they agreed to collaborate to reinforce the business relationship, and because their operations were not affected by the changes resulting from the collaborative projects.
- The main driver was the recognition from the environmental authority (and the perceived increase in reputation), which led to more support from the companies’ top management.
This study contributes to literature on sustainable supply chain management, with a special focus on environmental collaboration, a relatively new area that still lacks solid empirical studies.
