ABSTRACT
Ethical audit programs constitute an emerging extra-contractual regime promoted by multinational brand retailers and manufacturers, as well as by audit professionals, to better manage supply chain risks and market performance. This chapter explores the role and power of the private 'ethical audit' regime within global value chain (GVC) governance. It describes the deployment of audits as a transnational regulatory 'gatekeeper', focusing in particular on the strategic power that corporations leverage over audit design, implementation, and enforcement. The chapter analyses the extra-contractual labor and environmental requirements advanced through audits, and the tension between these requirements and the traditional financial contractual business imperatives such as around price and speed to market. It concludes that as the audit regime is stabilizing an intrinsically unsustainable model of global production, it is ultimately promoting and reinforcing power asymmetries, ecological depletion and destruction, and global inequities.
