Balancing detail and scale in assessing transparency to improve the governance of agricultural commodity supply chains

The document introduces a methodology to bridge the gap between macro-scale footprint accounts and fine-scale traceability systems in agricultural supply chains. By integrating country-wide sub-national production data with per-shipment customs data, the approach identifies specific actors and production landscapes. This enables more accurate assessment of geographic risk variability and the identification of actor coalitions for coordinated sustainability interventions.

• Existing sustainability assessments for agricultural supply chains are limited because they either focus on coarse-grained analyses, fail to identify individual actors, or are too expensive to implement consistently across entire production regions.
• The proposed middle-ground approach improves governance by providing higher spatial resolution to better account for geographic variability in risk and performance, and by identifying key actors—including producers, traders, shippers, and consumers—to facilitate coordinated interventions.

APA

Stockholm Environment Institute (2016). Balancing detail and scale in assessing transparency to improve the governance of agricultural commodity supply chains. https://www.sei.org/publications/balancing-detail-and-scale-in-assessing-transparency-to-improve-the-governance-of-agricultural-commodity-supply-chains/

Chicago

Stockholm Environment Institute. Balancing detail and scale in assessing transparency to improve the governance of agricultural commodity supply chains. 2016. https://www.sei.org/publications/balancing-detail-and-scale-in-assessing-transparency-to-improve-the-governance-of-agricultural-commodity-supply-chains/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Stockholm Environment Institute |title=Balancing detail and scale in assessing transparency to improve the governance of agricultural commodity supply chains |date=23 March 2016 |url=https://www.sei.org/publications/balancing-detail-and-scale-in-assessing-transparency-to-improve-the-governance-of-agricultural-commodity-supply-chains/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{stockholmenvironmentinstitute2016balancing, author = {{Stockholm Environment Institute}}, title = {{Balancing detail and scale in assessing transparency to improve the governance of agricultural commodity supply chains}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2016}, month = mar, url = {https://www.sei.org/publications/balancing-detail-and-scale-in-assessing-transparency-to-improve-the-governance-of-agricultural-commodity-supply-chains/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }