Coercion, Consent & Sustainability Without Sustenance
On sustainable fashion's overstory.
It’s the last day of 2024. The word “consent” has been invading my thoughts like whack-a-mole, banging me over the head, willing me to pay attention. I’m smiling as I write. The irony is not lost on me: I can’t even come up with an analogy for telling you, my reader, about my mental happenings without invoking coercion… even when those very happenings are about consent.
The thing is, as an industry, we have a sustainability agenda to which many key stakeholders, if given a choice, would not consent.
For example, fashion’s approach to climate action focuses almost exclusively on decarbonization – singularly focused on emissions reduction as opposed to preparing for a world that’s hotter. Indeed, a cursory web scan of fashion’s most influential multi stakeholder organizations, reveals “collective” climate plans that refer primarily, if not exclusively, to decarbonization.
But if we were to ask manufacturers, who tend to operate in some of the places most vulnerable to climate change, and who tend to employ some of the people most vulnerable to climate change, what their climate action priorities are, they would probably say something about adaptation and resilience – preparing for a world that’s hotter.
Meanwhile, countless tools, continuous improvement programs, innovations, and beyond are peddled to manufacturers as the solution to “their” decarbonization woes. When “uptake” and “adoption” of these solutions are lackluster, the industry scratches its head. Then, faced with behavior they don’t understand, a slew of sustainability professionals make it their mission to “help” manufacturers understand why the solutions, which address neither their problems nor priorities, are, in fact, good for them.
The result is coercive.
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I want to hit pause on the word coercive. Oxford Languages defines coercive as the practice of persuading someone to do something by using force or threats.
Do we, as an industry, as a community of well-intentioned professional do-gooders, think that using force or threats is what will drive behavior change? Do we believe that coercion is our golden ticket to transformation?
I think we do.
And while I could rattle off the long list of command-and-control policies, programs and tools currently being deployed in the name of sustainability as evidence, I want to strip it back to the basics, to the word loudly and proudly ingrained into sustainability’s very DNA: leverage.
The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) are the most authoritative normative framework for guiding responsible business conduct. The principles state that “where a business enterprise contributes or may contribute to an adverse human rights impact, it should… use its leverage [emphasis added] to mitigate any remaining impact to the greatest extent possible.” The principles go on to say that “if the business enterprise has leverage to prevent or mitigate the adverse impact, it should exercise it. And if it lacks leverage there may be ways for the enterprise to increase it...”
The OECD Due Diligence Guidelines for Responsible Supply Chains in the Garment and Footwear Sector, which can be considered the practical blueprint for operationalizing the UNGPs within fashion, recommend that companies— whether brands or suppliers — consolidate their purchases from a smaller group of partners. This will enable them to exert more influence. Should this fail, companies can increase their leverage by collaborating with other businesses also purchasing from the same supplier.
Here’s how Oxford Languages defines leverage: exertion of force by means of a lever.
Indeed, the definition of leverage is almost identical to the definition of coercion. Both words are, at their core, about getting someone to do something by force.
In his latest book Revenge of the Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell uses the term "overstory" to describe overarching societal narratives or ideas that shape and influence the behavior, beliefs, and actions of individuals and groups within a society. The term draws an analogy to the uppermost layer of a forest canopy, which dominates and affects everything beneath it. These "overstories" function as powerful, often invisible frameworks that determine how people understand and engage with the world around them.
Gladwell’s “overstory” is a lot like David Foster-Wallace’s famous fish parabel, which highlights how the most fundamental aspects of our lives, like "water" for fish, often go unnoticed because they are so pervasive.
Leverage and coercion are sustainability’s overstory. They are the water to David Foster-Wallace’s fish.
This was the realization that snuck into my rearview mirror in 2024: as a community of well intentioned professional do-gooders, myself included, our default is to believe – deeply – that control and coercion are our only options for driving transformation.
The fact that we have enshrined leverage so front and center in the foundational principles that guide everything else we now do in the name of sustainable fashion is indicative of our collective theory of change: we believe transformation must come by force.
But does it?
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Well, if it does, we sure don’t have much to show for it – decarbonization targets we know we won’t meet, circularity goals that mostly still feel like a distant future, persistently inadequate wages on the production floor, I could go on.
For those of you thinking – yes, but this is why we need legislation! – let me stop you right there. The coercion overstory is so powerful, and so normalized, that we fail to notice some of the most obvious evidence that legislation (itself arguably a form of coercion) probably will not magically solve our sustainability woes.
Take, for example, the curious case of Leceister. Despite being located in a developed country, in a city acclaimed for its strong governance, labor rights abuses have persisted in Leicseter’s apparel sector. Manufactured Podcast, together with some inspiring partners, recently released a series exploring this conundrum because we wanted to understand the lessons for global sustainability legislation. If you’re interested in the answer, go listen to the series.
For now, for the purposes of this piece, suffice it to say that I believe the push for sustainability legislation in the global North reflects a desperate, last-ditch, attempt to hold onto a coercive theory of change.
We tell ourselves that the reason our past efforts to drive transformation haven’t worked isn’t that our understanding of what drives change is flawed—it’s simply that we haven’t enforced it strongly enough. Like in the OECD Guidelines, the antidote to lack of leverage is more of it. We must get better and more effective at coercion!
Truth be told, I’m puzzled: leverage in fashion supply chains is already highly consolidated—willy-nilly order cancellations and steep discounts are clear evidence of this. Zooming out, it’s hard to see how, without such concentrated leverage, we could have advanced a sustainability agenda that primarily benefits brands and retailers in the first place—an agenda many other stakeholders likely wouldn’t support if they genuinely had a choice. And to be clear, this lack of support isn’t due to a lack of commitment to sustainability itself. Instead, it reflects a fundamentally different set of sustainability priorities and visions for how sustainability should be put into practice.
But I digress. The key point is this: leverage in fashion supply chains is already highly consolidated, meaning our ability to shape behavior through coercion is already quite strong. Yet, despite this, our collective social and environmental impact keeps worsening, not improving. So why do we believe that increasing leverage—creating an even more unequal relationship between supply chain actors—will somehow solve the problem?
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If leverage and coercion aren’t what drives change, then what is?
In a piece I published back in November, I wrote about what makes people engage in behavior that leads to suboptimal collective outcomes. Here’s the one sentence summary: it's not inherent evil or malice, but contexts that limit our choices, that cause us all, myself included, to behave in ways that lead to collective outcomes none of us want. Which begs the question, which contexts will lead people to do things that do lead to desirable collective outcomes?
I recently read Brave New Work by Aaron Dignon. Dignon uses the term “people-positive” – which refers to the belief that people are inherently capable, trustworthy, and motivated to do meaningful work. Being “people-positive” emphasizes creating environments that empower individuals, nurture their potential, and recognize their ability to contribute when given autonomy and respect.
Dignon builds on Theory X and Theory Y, introduced by Douglas McGregor in The Human Side of Enterprise in 1960, which describes two contrasting views of human motivation in the workplace. The first, Theory X, assumes people are inherently lazy, avoid responsibility, and require strict supervision and control to be productive. Managers with this mindset rely on authoritarian leadership and external motivators like rewards and punishments. The second, Theory Y, assumes people are self-motivated, seek responsibility, and thrive when given autonomy and trust. This perspective emphasizes participative management, empowerment, and creating environments that foster creativity and collaboration.
McGreggor suggests that we see ourselves as Theory Y (self-motivated and responsible) while perceiving others as Theory X (lazy and needing control), highlighting biases in how motivation is perceived.
Dignon’s advocacy for “people-positive” organizations also draws on the work of psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, whose research found that greater autonomy leads to increased intrinsic motivation, highlighting the importance of self-determination in fostering engagement and productivity.
Before you think I’ve totally lost the plot and close this tab, bear with me – I promise to connect all the dots. I began this piece with a definition of coercion, and with the suggestion that we deeply believe that coercion drives transformation, even though it does not, in fact, seem to be driving a sustainable transformation – at least in fashion. Then I asked: if coercive contexts seem to be leading us to engage in behavior that leads to suboptimal collective then what kind of context would change that?
What Dignon, McGreggor, Deci, Ryan – and, to be honest probably lots of other people operating in the holocracy and sociocracy space – suggest is that it’s autonomy.
Autonomy.
Well I’ll be damned. You know what the dictionary lists as an antonym for coercion?
Autonomy.
Which brings me full circle: leverage is how we operationalize coercion. Consent is how we operationalize autonomy. And I suspect that this, dear reader, is why consent, as an operating principle, has been invading my thoughts like whack-a-mole, banging me over the head, willing me to pay attention.
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I want to share a conversation I had a couple of months ago with a senior manager of one of fashion’s leading sustainability organizations. They expressed that they wanted to get their organization to a place where manufacturers were participating of their own volition – and not just because it was a brand requirement.
The conversation scrambled my brain – it was all the right words, words that should have been music to my ears, but something about it felt “off.”
Cycling home, my brain was so distracted that I fell from my bike, ripping my new bright red elasticated-waist postpartum jeans at the knee in the process. In the months since, as I’ve mulled the interaction over and confronted the piece of knee skin that now peers up at me through those red jeans during zoom calls, I’ve come to sense that my discomfort had something to do with sustainability’s coercion overstory.
In my mind, I can’t shake the image of Jafar from Disney’s Aladdin. His serpentine staff lets him hypnotize others, for example when he compels the Sultan to follow his commands. To onlookers, it seems like the Sultan is acting of his own free will, but of course, he isn’t really.
Something about the conversation felt like Jafar getting the Sultan to follow his commands by using his magical serpentine staff – yes, the Sultan was behaving the way Jafar wanted, and yes, and it appeared as though this was of the Sultan’s own volition, but in reality, the Sultan had not, in fact, consented.
To be clear, the person with whom I was speaking was nothing like Jafar. They were kind, curious, engaged, and motivated by a genuine desire to make the world better. At first, I dismissed my mental image as just me being my weird, dramatic self. But over time, I realized it wasn’t about the individual—it was about the context in which we operate – the water, the overstory.
Here’s the issue: we want manufacturers to engage in sustainability efforts, to flock to the cause, because we know their participation is key to transformation. Yet we don’t want to give up control. We want them to "see the light," but only if we’re the ones holding it—deciding where, when, and how it shines. What we seem to want – like Jafar’s serpentine staff – is coerced consent, which, to state the obvious, isn’t consent at all.
This is why co-creation is so challenging and at risk of becoming another hollow buzzword. We can’t truly advocate for manufacturer engagement if we’re not ready to let go of a sustainability agenda that many manufacturers, if given a real choice, wouldn’t consent to. And we can’t advocate for genuine manufacturer engagement if we’re unwilling to abandon a coercive theory of change – a theory of change predicated on leverage.
In hindsight, this is why the encounter, despite appearing so positive, nonetheless felt off. The individual sincerely wanted to improve manufacturer engagement but seemed to believe it could be achieved by simply sprinkling some sugar on top of business as usual. Their goal seemed to be to make something so irresistible that manufacturers wouldn’t be able to say no. In this scenario, the organization would still be the one doing the creating (holding the keys) whilst the manufacturers would still be relegated to the role of implementers. It would not be a fundamental rethink of how we design sustainability programs or of what drives meaningful change in the first place.
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My hope for 2025 is that, as a community of well-intentioned professional do-gooders, we let go of an implicit theory of change premised on coercion. Not only is this approach failing to drive meaningful progress, but it’s also making many of us deeply unhappy in the process. Instead I hope we embrace a theory of change founded on autonomy.
Oxford Languages defines autonomy as the right or condition of self-government. To this end, here are three beliefs I want to embrace in 2025:
Effective approaches to sustainability require expanded access to decision-making.
How decisions are made matters more than the decisions themselves.
Although influence over decision-making can come in a variety of forms, opt-in, freely-given, influence that starts from within is more transformational than coercive influence derived from force and imposed from outside.
For me, this is not just an esoteric exercise, it’s about recalibrating my human and professional selves, it’s about reharmonizing my personal motivation for getting into this work in the first place with what I actually spend my time doing to make a living.
I’m hopeful that letting go of a coercive theory of change will be an antidote to all the disillusionment, frustration, burn-out, and frankly, mal-nourishment, that, at least in this present moment, seems to define the day-to-day of so many well-intentioned professional do-gooders’ work – myself included. I’m tired of sustainability without sustenance.