Transition to sustainable development in the tanning industry: Evidence from leather value chain in Tamil Nadu, India

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), while balancing the three dimensions of sustainability, are latent about the pathways to achieve it. The transition may involve trade‐offs between the different dimensions of sustainable development, like balancing the socio‐economic dimension with environmental limits. The paper attempts to demonstrate some of these channels for the leather value chain in India, which is a conspicuous source of precarious labour and polluting industrial processes. Interacting the firm's objectives with value chain governance, we introduce four quadrants for the transition to sustainability. Combining voices from the field with a novel dataset, we provide evidence of the intersections between socio‐economic and environmental sustainability illustrative of countries in the global South. The precarity of work and inadequate upgrading of the production process co‐exist in most firms. We find that firms tend to hover around baseline economies of lower costs, work precarity and hazardous processes while exhibiting inertia for a transition. However, a few units are either transitioning or have nearly attained decent work practices and progress to cleaner technologies. The sustainability transition demands engagement in the social and economic upgrading of production processes and organisational practices. It is multi‐dimensional, ameliorating precarious labour and upgrading to cleaner technologies.