New possibilities of communication and a widening range of fair trade products prompted an evolution in the direction of a less hierarchical global network of actors since the late 1980s. The advent of the ‘network society’ has had a fundamental impact on civic activism. The history of the fair trade movement is particularly instructive in this respect, because activists had attempted to muster transnational coalitions ever since its inception. This chapter highlights the history of the Clean Clothes Campaign, which mustered a coalition of trade union representatives and human rights activists from the global South and solidarity activists in the North to pressure companies in the textile industry to improve working conditions. The history of the Clean Clothes Campaign also provides a perspective on the altered landscape of fair trade activism in the wake of the success of fair trade certification, which was extended into textiles with the introduction of fair trade-certified cotton in the early 2000s. Surveying the breadth of the movement, this chapter develops a typology of adversarial and collaborative approaches employed by activists targeting businesses.

Have we left postcolonial globalization behind with the demise of the Third World, the emergence of a global network society, and a shift away from debating fair trade predominantly in relation to South-North relations? This concluding chapter reconsiders the history of humanitarianism in the light of the evolution of the fair trade movement’s repertoire and goals. It argues that even though the legacy of colonialism is still with us, the practices and perspectives of fair trade activism have recently shifted to such an extent that we are indeed entering a new phase of the history of globalization.

After attempts to target national and international politics stalled, the network of groups concerned with fair trade regrouped around local activism. This chapter shows how paper was a crucial product to understand the strand of activism which emerged in the 1970s: it served as a medium for groups across Europe to keep in contact but was also the main carrier of information about the injustices the movement tried to address through distributing leaflets, posters, and books. Activism in many places was anchored by so-called world shops, which had first emerged in the Netherlands at the end of the 1960s as meeting places for activists with similar concerns. The model quickly spread throughout Europe, offering activists a way to come together around a diverse set of issues, which they first and foremost addressed in their own neighbourhoods. The chapter offers an alternative reading of 1970s activism, claiming that social activism did not subside but rather shifted towards local activities, which has been less visible to contemporary observers as well as historians.

The introduction posits the relevance of the history of fair trade activism to the history of postcolonial globalization to highlight three striking transformations: decolonization, the rise of consumer society, and the emergence of the internet. It underlines the importance of studying ‘moderate’ movements as part of a social history of globalization. It goes on to relate the history of fair trade to earlier historiography, demonstrating how the history of third-world movements, consumer activism, and humanitarianism can be combined to better understand the history of this movement. It finally introduces the structure of the book, which takes its cue from the materiality, which was crucial to the development of the fair trade movement by centring five products: handicrafts, sugar, paper, coffee, and textiles.

During the 1950s, civic groups started to sell handicrafts as an act of solidarity with their makers. This fostered a new global outlook amongst producers and potential buyers. This chapter analyses the early history of fair trade history, which revolves around handicrafts which were sold by charitable and solidarity initiatives since the early 1950s. It thus focuses on those actors within the movement which directly import products, first from all over the world, then more pronouncedly from ‘developing’ countries. The chapter tracks the emergence of these importers to demonstrate how the fair trade movement could develop, demonstrating the importance of missionary and solidarity networks and the fluent transition from an approach related to charity to one aiming at structural change.

The ‘Cane Sugar Campaign’, launched in 1968, introduced a distinctly political perspective in campaigns for fair trade, exposing the unequal structures of global trade around the disparities in the global sugar trade. The campaign was ignited by the stalling negotiations of the United Nations Conferences on Trade and Development in 1964 and 1968. It thus directly responded to the impact of decolonization in international politics. Through transferring these issues to local activism, it related such international development to the everyday lives of people in Western Europe. The chapter charts the emergence of attempts to address global inequality through interventions in national, European, and international politics. It then shows how European integration in particular prompted activists to set up transnational campaigns, but also severely hampered attempts at campaigning because of the difficulty of transnational communication as well as a lack of experience in addressing transnational institutions.

Coffee has arguably been the essential product of fair trade activism. This chapter analyzes how earlier campaigns to promote fair trade around coffee eventually evolved into the practice of certification. Certification has been the most visible and economically impactful aspect of fair trade activism. At the same time, it has been criticized for introducing a predominantly economic and non-transformative perspective into the movement. Based on a new analysis of the emergence of certification first in the Dutch organization Max Havelaar and then in the context of international cooperation of fair trade organizations, this chapter demonstrates that certification has to be regarded not just as a means to sell more products, but also as a tool to gain more political and economic leverage. The introduction of fair trade certification was part of a broader trend in which fair trade activism became more professional and engaged new stakeholders such as supermarkets.

South Korea implemented vertical as well as horizontal industrial policies in the 1960s and 1970s. Though they performed better than in other developing countries, the cost of the vertical policy outweighed its benefit. Industrial policies went side by side with the emergence of chaebol in a full-fledged form. Chaebol led the structural transformation of the economy, but they also led the production of non-performing loans, helping to deepen the 1979 crisis. In the 1980s, the government lifted vertical policy but strengthened horizontal policy while restructuring chaebol. In the 1990s, South Korea jumped into the newly-emerging information and communication technology industries with industrial policy. Meanwhile, the government began to promote small and medium-sized enterprises and introduced fair trade policies in the 1980s. By the mid-1990s, chaebol emerged as global players in higher-technology industries; however, they had many problems, the financial market problem being the most serious, ready to precipitate a crisis.

Evidence, from experimental work in behavioral/social psychology and from real-world examples of the effect of connectedness on charitable giving, is discussed that supports the relational theory of collective action. The earliest work in psychology shows how witnessing pain experienced by another leads to the self participating in this experience as well. Empathy, both emotional and cognitive, has been shown to be a pathway that links connectedness to other-regarding behavior. Countless examples of sefless giving are found in real life, where charities strive to strengthen bonds between givers and recipients, where fair trade organizations work to make the working conditions in farms, and the farmers themselves, more real to the consumer, and nature conservation organizations find ways to make protected species not just objects of collective action but living, feeling individuals.

This chapter uses a single case study – the NGO response to calls for a new imternational economic order (NIEO) – to analyse the mechanics of the global justice movement in the 1970s and the future it created for non-governmental aid. This NIEO ‘imaginary’ had a long history, rooted in the ethical consumerism of the anti-slavery movement, nineteenth century consumer ‘buycotts’, and the rise of alternative trading organisations in the aftermath of the Second World War. But it was also the product of the very specific ideological environment from which the NGO sector emerged. As this chapter shows, the debate surrounding the NIEO produced a conflict between welfarists and economic liberals about the kind of world they wished to build. Along the way, however, it also revealed much about the moral foundations on which non-governmental aid was constructed: its hierarchical nature, its politics and its ideological base. The chapter ends with a reflection on the NGO sector that this commitment to fair trade made. Put simply, it rooted its success in a commitment to reform rather than revolution – and an approach that was fundamentally incompatible with the radicalisation of aid.

This chapter uses a single case study – the NGO response to calls for a new imternational economic order (NIEO) – to analyse the mechanics of the global justice movement in the 1970s and the future it created for non-governmental aid. This NIEO ‘imaginary’ had a long history, rooted in the ethical consumerism of the anti-slavery movement, nineteenth century consumer ‘buycotts’, and the rise of alternative trading organisations in the aftermath of the Second World War. But it was also the product of the very specific ideological environment from which the NGO sector emerged. As this chapter shows, the debate surrounding the NIEO produced a conflict between welfarists and economic liberals about the kind of world they wished to build. Along the way, however, it also revealed much about the moral foundations on which non-governmental aid was constructed: its hierarchical nature, its politics and its ideological base. The chapter ends with a reflection on the NGO sector that this commitment to fair trade made. Put simply, it rooted its success in a commitment to reform rather than revolution – and an approach that was fundamentally incompatible with the radicalisation of aid.

This chapter analyses the growing use of ethical certification schemes as a strategy to fight forced labor in the contemporary global economy. It draws on a large primary dataset from the Global Business of Forced Labour study, collected from 2016–2018, which sheds light into the business models of forced labor in the cocoa and tea industries as well as the effectiveness of ethical certification in combatting forced labor. Drawing on data that demonstrates that ethical certification schemes are failing to create worksites that are free from exploitation, I argue that ethical certification labelling is misleading consumers about the labor conditions involved in the goods they are buying. I explore the contradictions of selling "ethical" products that give the impression that goods have been made through labor standards that they are known to fall short of. I explore the challenge of modernizing historically successful strategies to combat slavery made-goods for use in the present.

Activists have long used the market as a tool for empowering specific populations, sustaining the environment, and shifting cultural values. Today, these practices are commonly referred to as “ethical purchasing,” “political consumerism,” and “voting with your dollar.” The fair trade movement emerged in the 1940s as a way for consumers in the Global North to support populations in the Global South vulnerable to marginalization, exploitation, or oppression. Since then, the movement has grown in size, expanded in scope, and diversified in many ways. Today, it intersects with the organic movement, climate change advocacy, and other aspects of environmentalism. This chapter reviews the burgeoning fair trade literature, drawing heavily on publications from the past five years, to describe and discuss four provocative debates: 1) Fair trade for whom? 2) Fair trade by whom? 3) Fair trade through certification (or not)? and 4) What next for engaging capitalism and the state? After highlighting the perspectives and questions dominating each debate, this chapter offers several suggestions about the future of fair trade.

This chapter addresses the moral justifiability of some of the international legal rules that govern cross-border trade.The primary focus is on the moral standards that ought to be used to critically evaluate those rules or proposals for their reform.Thus the chapter investigates several moral arguments for free trade, such as the claim that it provides an especially effective mechanism for alleviating poverty, and several arguments in defense of restrictions or conditions on trade, including the moral permissible of partiality to compatriots and the right of those who cooperate to make international trade possible to a fair share of the benefits it yields.The chapter concludes with an examination of the argument that the import and consumption of oil and other natural resources from countries ruled by tyrants constitutes trade in stolen goods, a violation of existing international law.

Voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) seek to improve social and economic outcomes in developing nations through voluntary commitments by firms located in these countries, who can advertise their adherence to the standard through certification and associated labels. VSS are a potential instrument to help achieve some of the objectives of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but the current empirical evidence on their effectiveness is mixed. Distinguishing between Fair Trade VSS developed by non-governmental organizations and corporate-backed private VSS, this chapter disentangles the possible channels through which these two types of VSS regimes may impact on trade and, in turn, on SDGs. We review the evidence in the light of these channels, finding important differences between the two categories of VSS.

The chapter explains why the EU explicitly decided not to intervene in private fair trade governance on two separate occasions, in 1999 and in 2009. The chapter starts by comparing private fair trade governance schemes, including Fairtrade International, Rainforest Alliance, and UTZ Certified. It then discusses why EU policymakers in the 1990s focused on Fairtrade only and declined to intervene because of the specific North–South trade dynamics of this issue area; the lack of concrete productive opportunities in the EU; and institutional constraints of the international trade regime. The Fair Trade movement’s successful harmonization of complementary private governance schemes also contributed to the EU’s non-interventionist approach. The broadening of the policy domain beyond Fairtrade in the early 2000s did not lead to fragmentation concerns, since differences among the schemes were framed as commercial and economic-ideological in nature and not problematized as a fragmentation issue. Active lobbying by and on behalf of private governance schemes ensured this outcome, resulting in a market for private governance that remains free of public intervention.

This chapter examines (1) publicly available data on the municipal activities of TNCs culled from their own corporate reports, (2) the powers of local governments enshrined in local laws vis-a-vis the protections of TNCs under international law, (3) public opinion of municipal residents as captured in various surveys, (4) the results of scientific studies, including those that test the chemical composition of fuels sold by TNCs, and (5) those studies that subject the exercise of political power to social scientific analyses.

On these bases, it can be argued that, although they are not accountable to any electorate, transnational corporations (TNCs) in Africa play significant roles in planning and governing cities in Africa. TNCs effectively manage important aspects of African life through control of municipal utilities, through the corporate governance of natural resources held by Africans in common, and through ad hoc investment practices that facilitate the private appropriation of socially created rents.