Patterns of Collaboration for Sustainability in the Global Clothing Industry

Global industries are characterized by complex networks of organizations, which are often dominated by a few disproportionately large transnational corporations. While industry consolidation is not a new phenomenon, the scale and speed at which global industries now impact diverse social-ecological systems is unprecedented. In this thesis, I combine the interconnected perspective of business ecosystems with the sustainability focus of the social-ecological systems literature through the concept of keystone actors. Adopting a network perspective, I apply this framing to the global clothing industry, and specifically analyze the patterns of coordination and collaboration among actors working to address systemic sustainability challenges facing the industry. While keystone actors wield significant influence over both the industry’s biophysical and socio-economic impacts, I find it is the presence of key brokers – actors who mediate indirect connections between keystone actors in the clothing industry – that possess the potential to coordinate action around sustainability challenges into a collective industry-wide effort. I conclude the thesis by discussing how the empirical findings, and network perspective more generally, can advance the study of keystone actors in global business ecosystems