Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-27541-w

REVIEW ARTICLE

Cooperation, coordination, or collaboration? A structured review

of buyers’ partnerships to support sustainable sourcing in supply
chains
Hamid Zarei1,2 · Morteza Rasti‑Barzoki1,3,4 · Jörn Altmann3,4,6 · Bernhard Egger5

Received: 7 January 2023 / Accepted: 6 May 2023 / Published online: 7 June 2023
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023

Abstract
The growing need of today’s global supply chains for a paradigm shift to sustainability requires all supply chain members to estab-
lish partnership relationships. However, the existing literature fails to provide a comprehensive understanding of these partnerships.
The present research contributes to understanding the nature and structure of the buyers’ partnerships for enhancing sustainable
sourcing. A structured review methodology is adopted to collect information about supply chain partnerships from the literature
on sustainable sourcing. Then, a content analysis is conducted on the collected information using a comprehensive partnership
framework, i.e., the McNamara framework. The framework suggests ten interconnected facets to characterize the structure of
a partnership and classifies the nature of partnerships into three categories called cooperation, coordination, and collaboration.
The findings indicate that cooperative partnerships are not effective for promoting sustainable sourcing as they lack the exchange
of resources between the participating organizations. In contrast, coordinative partnerships are mainly effective for tactical and
operational initiatives to address reactive, end-of-pipe solutions for sustainable sourcing. Finally, collaborative partnerships should
be mainly initiated at the strategic level to design proactive solutions for sustainable sourcing. Some practical implications are
provided to facilitate the transition of supply chains to sustainability. Some open questions for future research are also provided.

Keywords Sustainability · Multi-stakeholder engagement · Coordination · Collaboration · Trust

Nomenclature
OD Organizational design
FA Formality of the agreement
APO Autonomy of the participating organizations
Responsible Editor: Arshian Sharif KP Key personnel
IS Information sharing
* Morteza Rasti‑Barzoki
rasti@cc.iut.ac.ir DM Decision-making
CR Conflict resolution
1
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Isfahan RA Resource allocation
University of Technology, Isfahan 84156‑83111, Iran
ST Systems thinking
2
Department of Transportation Engineering, Isfahan TR Trust
University of Technology, Isfahan 84156‑83111, Iran
C1 Cooperation
3
Institute of Engineering Research, College of Engineering, C2 Coordination
Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, South Korea C3 Collaboration
4
Present Address: Technology Management Economics
and Policy Program, Graduate School of Engineering
Practice, College of Engineering, Seoul National University,
Seoul 08826, South Korea Introduction
5
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, College
of Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, In the last few decades, global competitive markets put
South Korea pressure on supply chains to enhance their efficiency and
6
Integrated Major in Smart City Global Convergence, Seoul lower their prices. These pressures stimulate buying firms
National University, Seoul 08826, South Korea (hereafter buyers) to outsource their products to suppliers

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76492
in developing countries (Awan 2019; Awan et al. 2018).
These countries benefit from the competitive advantage
of low amounts of labor, energy, and raw material costs,
which facilitates the economic efficiency of supply chains.
For example, 95% of apparel products are sourced globally,
and countries in Southeast Asia are the main exporter of the
products (Ha-Brookshire 2017; Shao et al. 2020).
However, the buyers’ sourcing from suppliers in devel-
oping countries has brought some challenges in recent
years (Apergis et al. 2021; Govindan et al. 2020; Hameed
et al. 2020; Sarkar et al. 2021). Poor legal infrastructures
in these countries, besides low transparency, may motivate
suppliers to cut corners and disregard their environmental
and social responsibilities (Chen and Lee 2017). Public dis-
covery of the suppliers’ non-compliant activities imposes
financial and reputational consequences on the buyers (Guo
et al. 2016). These activities include employing child labor
(Cho et al. 2019), poor working conditions (Chen and Lee,
2017; Guo et al. 2016), inappropriate treatment of waste
materials (Chen and Lee 2017; Guo et al. 2016), and poor
workplace safety (Awasthy and Hazra, 2019).
Since 1987, academics and practitioners have suggested
the term sustainability to address the above-mentioned chal-
lenges (Brundtland et al. 1987). In supply chains, a paradigm
shift to sustainability requires all supply chain members to
consider the short- and long-term environmental, social, and
economic consequences when making their decisions. Many
of today’s supply chains are buyer-driven, especially in the
electronics, apparel, and grocery industries (Awasthy and
Hazra 2019; Ertek and Griffin 2002; Zarei et al. 2020). In this
regard, the buyers’ role in their suppliers’ sustainability has
been so focused that practitioners and academics suggest the
term “sustainable sourcing” for buyers (Kügerl et al. 2023).
The paradigm shift to sustainability requires some dis-
ruptive changes in supply chains. In the traditional view to
supply chains, buyers and suppliers participated in some
arm’s length transactions in which they act completely
autonomously. However, achieving supply chain sustain-
ability necessitates blurring their organizational bounda-
ries, usually by commitment to some collective efforts and
defining some collective objectives (Daly 2009; Phillips and
Caldwell 2005). In particular, the buyer-supplier relationship
must be transitioned to a partnership, if sustainability is to
be pursued (Awan et al. 2022; Yang and Lien 2018).
Uncovering buyers’ partnerships to support sustainable
sourcing can facilitate the transition to sustainability. Struc-
tures and infrastructures within traditional supply chains have
been mainly designed to respond to buyer-supplier arm’s
length relationships, and sustainability has not been addressed
in them (Awan et al. 2022). For example, communication
channels have been designed to transmit only some economic
information, e.g., the final consumers’ product characteristics
and order information (Li, 2002). The channels usually fail to
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Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514
address the heterogeneity between buyers and suppliers with
respect to some non-economic factors, impeding the estab-
lishment of buyer-supplier partnerships (Awan 2019; Awan
et al. 2018). Also, collective efforts between buyers and sup-
pliers may have been limited to processing freight in logistics
centers (Tamannaei et al. 2021a). Extending our comprehen-
sive knowledge about buyers’ partnerships provides us with
some implications about how to establish new supply chain
structures and infrastructures, or reorganize the previous ones,
so that sustainability is involved in them.
Despite such necessity, the existing literature has failed
to provide a comprehensive understanding of the buyer’s
partnerships for sustainable sourcing. Yang and Lien (2018)
investigated relationships between green supply chain part-
nerships and two main supply chain challenges, i.e., the part-
ners’ bounded rationality and opportunism. However, Yang
and Lien (2018) have focused only on the partners’ collec-
tive efforts through joint problem solving. Hence, the other
side of the partnership, i.e., collective objectives, has been
neglected. Indeed, there is a need to focus on understand-
ing how partnerships could provide a strong foundation for
defining some collective objectives.
Chen et al. (2017) investigated supply chain partnerships
for sustainability. The researchers focused on the economic,
environmental, and social outcomes of the partnerships.
Also, the researchers found that supply chain members
mainly choose their suppliers and customers as their part-
ners. Investigating the nature and structure of partnerships is
an important feature neglected by Chen et al. (2017). Finally,
the administrative science literature has investigated differ-
ent general partnership structures, mainly in the context of
public and not-for-profit institutions (Sedgwick 2016, 2017).
The insights from this research stream cannot completely
fit the context of the buyer’s partnerships for sustainable
sourcing. This is because buyers and their main partners,
i.e., suppliers, are private, for-profit corporations.
The main objective of the present article is to provide a
comprehensive understanding of the buyers’ partnerships for
sustainable sourcing. The second objective is to provide some
implications for reorganizing the supply chain structures and
infrastructures to foster the supply chain paradigm shift to
sustainability. We apply the McNamara theoretical framework
(McNamara 2012), which has attracted significant attention
in the general literature on environmental sustainability (Kark
et al. 2015; Margerum and Robinson 2015; McAllister and
Taylor 2015). The framework suggests ten facets to classify
partnership mechanisms into three categories. We adopt a
structured review methodology using the McNamara frame-
work to identify the buyers’ partnership mechanisms from the
academic literature on sustainable sourcing.
Through the lens of the McNamara framework, there
are three main approaches to partnership between differ-
ent agents: cooperation, coordination, and collaboration
Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514
(McNamara 2012). In this regard, the research questions of
this article are posed as follows:
Question 1. To what extent is the McNamara framework
capable to identify and distinguish between different buy-
ers’ partnerships for supporting sustainable sourcing?
Question 2. Under what conditions is each of the coop-
eration, coordination, and collaboration approaches to
the buyer’s partnerships effective for supporting sustain-
able sourcing?
The present article contributes to the literature by extend-
ing our knowledge about the nature and structure of the
buyers’ partnerships for sustainable sourcing. We adopt a
structured review methodology to collect information from
the literature on sustainable sourcing; then, the collected
content is analyzed using the McNamara framework. The
results reveal that cooperation is not effective to enhance
sustainable sourcing, as it fails stimulating collective efforts
between the partners. On the other hand, there are some
certain conditions in which each of the coordinative and
collaborative approaches is effective. In addition to its theo-
retical contributions, the present article offers some practi-
cal implications that allow reorganizing the structures and
infrastructures of today’s supply chains, which foster the
paradigm shift of supply chain members to sustainability.
The structure of the present article is as follows. First,
the theoretical background of the research is provided in
the “Theoretical background” section. Then, the “Methodol-
ogy” section explains the details of the methodology. The
“Results” section provides the results obtained by the con-
tent analysis of the literature on sustainable sourcing and the
application of the McNamara framework. The “Discussions
and implications” section provides the theoretical discus-
sions and the practical implications of the results. Finally,
conclusions are provided in the “Conclusions” section.
Theoretical background
If some organizations work together, then a partnership is
born. The organizations forming the partnership are called
the participating organizations (participants or partners).
The participants may exert individual efforts for the sake of
their individual objectives, or some new collective objec-
tives may be defined. Moreover, some staffs of the partici-
pants may create a collective unit to exert collective efforts,
which help the participants pursue their individual and/
or collective objectives. The participants also incur some
costs for the management and governance of the partnership,
called transaction costs (Kark et al. 2015).
The academic literature on the organization science has
suggested some frameworks for the study of organizational
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partnership. One of the most comprehensive one is the
McNamara framework (McNamara 2012). The framework
has attracted significant attention in the general literature on
environmental sustainability (Kark et al. 2015; Margerum
and Robinson 2015; McAllister and Taylor 2015).
The framework suggests a spectrum of partnership
approaches. This extends our understanding of the nature
of a partnership. Cooperation (C1) is at the starting point of
the spectrum; coordination (C2) is at the middle of the spec-
trum; and collaboration (C3) is at its end. The framework
also proposes ten different facets of partnerships to compare
the three partnership approaches. The facets provide a com-
prehensive understanding of the structure of partnership.
The details of the facets are provided in Table 1.
Cooperation is an approach to partnership in which par-
ticipants are capable to accomplish their individual goals,
but prefer working together. They remain autonomous by
making independent decisions. They also retain their exist-
ing structures, procedures, and policies, to meet their indi-
vidual objectives. The partnership facilitates sharing infor-
mation, building capacity, or generating synergy for the
participants. Since no collective effort is established, little
conflict arises between the participants, and no trusting rela-
tionship is necessary during the partnership.
In todays’ supply chains, relationships between buyers,
suppliers, and third-party auditors can indicate a coopera-
tive partnership. A third-party auditor obtains some informa-
tion regarding the environmental and social performance of
suppliers and share it with their buyer(s) (Chen et al. 2019;
Plambeck and Taylor 2016). When sharing information, it
complies with the supplier’s intellectual property and only
shares the necessary information about supplier sustain-
ability (Karaer et al. 2017). The three agents target differ-
ent objectives when participating in the partnership. The
supplier may partially target sustainability in its operation,
and the buyer considers its brand image influenced by its
suppliers’ sustainability efforts. In contrast, the third-party
auditor gains a public utility if it discovers a supplier’s vio-
lation of sustainability (Chen et al. 2019). In addition, the
organizational structure of the third-party auditors is totally
different from those of the buyers and suppliers. They are
not-for-profit, either government-sponsored organizations
(Kalkanci and Plambeck 2020) or NGOs (Chen et al. 2019;
Karaer et al. 2017). As the number of third-party auditors is
growing in today’s global supply chains (Karaer et al. 2017),
our first hypothesis is as follows:
H1. The buyers’ cooperative partnership is effective to
promote sustainable sourcing.
In coordinative partnerships, the participants mobilize
formal linkages because they need the others’ assistance
to meet their objectives. Hence, the establishment of some
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Table 1  Ten facets of a partnership relationship (reference: McNamara (2012))

Facet name (abbreviation) Facet definition

Organizational design (OD)
Formality of the agreement (FA) The existence of explicit procedures that determine the responsibilities and roles of each organization when
Autonomy of the participating
organizations (APO)
Key personnel (KP)
Information sharing (IS)
Decision-making (DM)
Conflict resolution (CR)
Resource allocation (RA)
Systems thinking (ST)
Trust (TR)
The governance structure for supporting the collective efforts
participating in the in the collective effort
The extent to which the participating organizations work independently and apply their own policies and
procedures to achieve the objectives of the partnership
Personnel from both the collective unit and the individual organizations, which are responsible for the partner-
ship to be implemented
The participating organizations’ efforts to produce and communicate information required for accomplishing
the collective objective(s)
The way of reaching consensus on how the objectives are pursued
The existence of processes for solving problems between the participating organizations when a conflict arises
between them
The existence of procedures for exchanging and pooling of resources for the use of other organizations and the
collective unit
The existence of a holistic attitude, adopted by the participants, that facilitates the integration and expansion
of their service provision
The existence of mutual belief that all participating organizations’ efforts are aligned with the collective
objective(s)

collective efforts and collective objectives may be nec-
essary to achieve their individual objectives. The formal
linkages determine the participants’ roles and responsibili-
ties. The participants become semi-autonomous to execute
some centralized decision-making processes. A minimum
degree of trust is required in coordinative partnerships as
the participants must share their financial assets and physi-
cal property. Trust is defined as a partner’s attitude that
another partner in a partnership will not exploit its vulner-
ability (Guo et al. 2021; Liu 2018; Rahman et al. 2020;
Ramanathan et al. 2020). Some conflict may arise as the
participants tend to optimize their competing individual
objectives. Although trusting relationships can reduce
these conflicts, the existence of a third-party facilitator
may be needed. The facilitator should remember the par-
ticipants that the collective unit should respect the indi-
vidual objectives.
In the sustainable sourcing context, two real-world prac-
tices adopt the coordinative partnership approach: alliance
and accord. On the one hand, North American buyers cre-
ated a consortium called “Alliance for Bangladesh Worker
Safety” (Awasthy and Hazra 2019; Liu et al. 2019b). On the
other hand, the European buyers proposed the “European
Accord” (Leitheiser 2021). In the alliance mechanism, the
buyer shares its financial resources to compensate, fully or
partially, for the supplier’s expenditure incurred by sustain-
able operation (Awasthy and Hazra 2019). In the accord
mechanism, the buyer and the supplier exert some joint
efforts to improve the supplier’s compliance to social and
environmental standards (Awasthy and Hazra 2019; Niu
et al. 2022). Specifically, the buyer forms a dedicated team,
comprised of personnel from the two partners, to train the
supplier’s workers and implement mutually agreed safety
systems (Awasthy and Hazra 2019). In spite of the joint
actions in alliance and accord, the buyers and the suppliers
retain most of their autonomy, i.e., focusing on their own
core competencies and their own profit-seeking decisions
(Awasthy and Hazra 2019; Dadashian et al. 2007).
Although the alliance and accord mechanisms were
almost temporary projects (Retail_Council 2014), their idea
has continued. Nowadays, the Nike company continues this
innovative approach as a fixed component in its business
model. “We support our suppliers in building capabilities
that will increase engagement,” said the Nike company
(Nike 2022). Engagement means the supplier’s responsibil-
ity in human resource management, safety, worker-manager
communications, etc. (Nike 2022). The successful imple-
mentation of accord and alliance indicates the following
hypothesis about the coordinative partnership approach:
H2. The buyers’ coordinative partnership is effective to
promote sustainable sourcing.
In collaborative partnerships, participants work together
to define and address complex collective objectives. Vol-
untary staffs within the participating organizations select
appropriate partners in their own or other organizations to
initiate the collective efforts. By using a holistic approach,
the participants become interdependent and develop a shared
power structure. The approach is based on both formal and
informal agreements. The formal agreements bring the par-
ticipants together, while the informal agreements govern and
control the evolution of the collaborative partnership. Broad
mutual understanding between the participants is required

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to enhance their integration and interdependence. In this
regard, trust between the participants facilitates developing
collective objectives and mutual understanding and reduces
the imbalances of power between the participants.
The McNamara framework suggests that cooperation
requires the lowest level of the participants’ integration,
while collaboration requires the highest degree of integration
between the participants (McNamara 2012). A recent trend
indicates the existence of full integration (i.e., collabora-
tion) between some buyers and their suppliers to implement
sustainable sourcing. In the full integration mechanism,
the buyer acquires the suppliers, all financial and physical
assets are pooled, and all decisions, including the supplier
sustainability level, are made in a fully centralized manner
(Orsdemir et al. 2019).
Full integration is evident in musical instrument and
dairy supply chains. Taylor Guitars, a US guitar manu-
facturer, sources ebony woods from West African coun-
tries. The Crelicam company, the largest ebony supplier
in Cameroon, was fully integrated into Taylor Guitars in
2011 (White 2012). After that, great efforts were exerted
to improve sustainability conditions. For example, worker
wages were doubled and harvesting patterns were modi-
fied (Orsdemir et al. 2019). In addition, FrieslandCampina,
one of the five largest dairy companies in the world, adopts
the full integration mechanism. The company is owned by
farmers that integrated their supply and logistics activities.
After the integration in 2008, FrieslandCampina has initi-
ated an extensive sustainability program (Letizia and Hen-
drikse 2016). These examples about the successful imple-
mentation of collaboration indicate the following hypothesis:
H3. The buyers’ collaborative partnership is effective to
promote sustainable sourcing.
Besides the level of integration, the amount of transac-
tion costs is another comparative aspect of the three partner-
ship approaches. Participants in a cooperative partnership
incur the lowest transaction costs, while a collaborative
partnership imposes the highest transaction costs, com-
pared to cooperation and coordination (Mattessich and
Monsey 1992; McAllister and Taylor 2015). One may won-
der about why partners are willing to take the risk of the
highest transaction costs when joining into a collaborative
partnership. The literature suggests that complex problems
and diverging individual objectives necessitate harmonizing
the objectives through collaboration (Lombardo et al. 2022;
Lubell 2015; McAllister and Taylor 2015; Mina et al. 2022).
In this regard, the collaborative participants must work
hard together to blur their organizational boundaries (Kark
et al. 2015), share organizational powers (McNamara 2012),
and build a newly defined consensus on collective objectives
(Margerum and Robinson 2015).
76495
The relationship between Taylor Guitars and Creli-
cam is a good case indicating how complex sustainability
issues may necessitate the establishment of a collaborative
partnership. Ebony woods are endangered species. Hence,
their low supply and high demand lead to unsustainable
and illegal harvesting. This issue had increased the risk of
being raided by the police due to sourcing illegal mate-
rials. Taylor Guitars decided to eliminate these risks by
collaborating with Crelicam. The two companies exerted
great joint sustainability efforts to comply with the Cam-
eroon’s complex and obscure regulations and also align
their operations with the US laws. Before the collabora-
tion, a specific type of ebony, i.e., striped woods, was not
stylish for guitar consumers, which caused huge wood
waste. The two companies also invested in enhancing con-
sumer awareness and changing their opinions about striped
woods (Orsdemir et al. 2019). All these joint efforts were
effective to enhance the commitment to long-term sustain-
ability (Guitars 2023). Their collaboration is so successful
that other guitar manufacturers source their ebony woods
from them too (Orsdemir et al. 2019). Thus, we hypoth-
esize that:
H4. The buyers’ collaborative partnership is preferred
over cooperative and coordinative partnerships in case
of complex sustainable sourcing issues and solutions.
Methodology
We adopt a structured review methodology to uncover the
buyers’ partnerships for sustainable sourcing. The McNa-
mara framework is applied as the theoretical framework to
analyze the related academic literature, and methods such
as content analysis and correlation analysis are employed.
Table 2 explains the methodology in detail. “Article col-
lection” explains the article collection procedure. “Opera-
tionalization of the research variables” is devoted to opera-
tionalize the research variables.
Article collection
An extensive literature on sustainable sourcing and supply
chain sustainability has been studied to find the most rel-
evant articles that address buyers’ partnerships for sustain-
able sourcing. Finally, 33 articles were collected and ana-
lyzed according to the McNamara framework. Although
sustainable sourcing and supply chain sustainability are
two topics with extensive literature, most of the articles
address only the agents’ individual efforts to promote
sustainability (Chenavaz et al. 2021; Govindan 2022; Jin
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Table 2  The steps of the methodology

Step No. Step title Sub-step No. Details

1 Article collection
2 Content analysis
3 Descriptive analysis
4 Correlation analysis
5 Interpretation of the results -
- Identifying articles in the literature on sustainable sourcing and supply chain sustainability
that fit the buyer’s partnership for sustainable sourcing
2.1 Analyzing and interpreting the content of each content
2.2 Identifying the buyer’s partner(s)
2.3 Identifying the sustainable sourcing context (i.e., the sustainability issue and the solution
proposed)
2.4 Identifying the label of the partnership within the text of the article
2.5 Identifying the covered facet(s) and the covered partnership approach(es) based on McNa-
mara framework
2.6 Identifying whether complexity is inherent in the sustainable sourcing context introduced
in the article
2.7 Assessing the validity and necessity of the McNamara framework and responding to
Question 1 based on sub-steps 2.2, 2.4, and 2.5
- Testing H1–H3 based on sub-steps 2.1–2.7
- Testing H4 based on sub-steps 2.5 and 2.6
Responding to Question 2

Table 3  The details of the Index The related set Explanation

indices in the research variables
i {C1,C2,C3} C1: cooperation, C2: coordination, C3: collaboration
j {OD,FA,APO,KP,IS,DM,CR,RA,ST, According to the first column of Table 1
TR}
k {1,2,3,…,33} Denotes the number of the article collected from the
literature on sustainable sourcing

et al. 2021; Yeh 2021); even if there exists a partnership,
the buyer’s role is neglected in the partnership (Tamannaei
et al. 2021b; Wang et al. 2020; Yang et al. 2021). In this
regard, the presented articles are cohesive and exhaustive
compared to the other ones in the literature on sustainable
sourcing and supply chain sustainability in a sense that
they focus on addressing the buyers’ partnerships with
other stakeholders to support sustainable sourcing.
Operationalization of the research variables
The present article is aimed at uncovering the buyer’s part-
nership for sustainable sourcing. Three types of variables are
measured using the content analysis on the articles collected.
The variables xi, j, k used in the present article have a binary
nature, indicating whether a specific facet j of a specific part-
nership approach i has been studied in a specific article k.
The details of the indices are provided in Table 3.
To operationalize variables xi, j, k, the McNamara framework
is applied. The framework provides details about the quality of
each facet in each partnership approach. To this end, the opera-
tionalization of the research variables for the three partnership
approaches is provided in Tables 4, 5, and 6.
Binary variables yi, k can be defined based on xi, j, k, indi-
cating whether partnership approach i has been covered
in article k. The relationship between the variables is as
follows:
� ∑
1 j xi,j,k = 0
yi,k = ∑
0 j xi,j,k ≥ 1
Finally, variable zk measures whether complexity is inher-
ent in the sustainability issue and solution presented in arti-
cle k. The values of the variables are provided in Table 7
based on the content analysis of the literature.
Results
In “The applicability of McNamara’s framework,” a descrip-
tive analysis is provided to respond to Question 1. “Coopera-
tive partnerships for sustainable sourcing,” “Coordinative
partnerships for sustainable sourcing,” and “Organizational
design in coordination” are devoted to testing H1–H3 by
providing the content analysis and the interpretations of
the three partnership approaches studied in the collected

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Table 4  Operationalization of the ten variables related to the cooperative partnership

Variable name Operationalization of the variable

x(C1,OD,k) Equals to 1, if the participants remain independent structures; otherwise, equals to 0.

x(C1,FA,k) Equals to 1, if one of the conditions holds true about the agreement between the participants; otherwise, equals to 0.
(a) The decision to work together is contingent on the existence of opportunities for sharing information, building capacity, or
generating synergy for the participants.
(b) The agreement for creating the cooperative partnership is informal and non-binding.
(c) The participants are working together because they want to, not because their officials told them to do so.
x(C1,APO,k) Equals to 1, if the participants are completely autonomous and their procedures and policies are not modified after the partner-
ship; otherwise, equals to 0.
x(C1,KP,k) Equals to 1, if the two conditions hold true about the key personnel in the partnership; otherwise, equals to 0.
(a) The personnel within the lower levels of the participating organizations create the connection between the organizations.
(b) No participating staff has control or authority over the other ones.
x(C1,IS,k) Equals to 1, if the two conditions hold true about the quality of information sharing in the partnership; otherwise, equals to 0.
(a) The discussions between the participants create an informal communication channel for sharing basic information, which is
usually withheld in the case of no partnership. (b) Information sharing is not generally disrupted if a participating individual
leaves the discussion.
x(C1,DM,k) Equals to 1, if the participants make independent decisions, focusing on meeting their individual objectives; otherwise, equals to
0.
x(C1,CR,k) Equals to 1, if no conflict arises and there is no need for a conflict resolution procedure; otherwise, equals to 0.
Note: no conflict arises in cooperation because the participants remain autonomous, their procedures and policies are not modi-
fied, and the agreements are non-binding.
x(C1,RA,k) Equals to 1, if the sharing and pooling of the participants’ resources do not happen; otherwise, equals to 0.
x(C1,ST,k) Equals to 1, if the integration of the participants’ operational decisions does not happen; otherwise, equals to 0.
x(C1,TR,k) Equals to 1, if the establishment of trusting relationships is not necessary; otherwise, equals to 0.

Table 5  Operationalization of the ten variables related to the coordinative partnership

Variable name Operationalization of the variable

x(C2,OD,k) Equals to 1, if some linkages between the participants are created to determine their roles and responsibilities and to share a
specific resource or skill for specific collective efforts; otherwise, equals to 0.
x(C2,FA,k) Equals to 1, if the participants establish more formal agreements to pursue collective efforts and collective objectives that are
compatible with their individual objectives; otherwise, equals to 0.
x(C2,APO,k) Equals to 1, if the participants are semi-autonomous; otherwise, equals to 0.
• Note: being semi-autonomous means that the participants retain the most important aspects of their autonomy required for
governing their organizations. However, the officials of the participating organizations agree to contribute to some specific col-
lective efforts, without a need for complete alignment of their policies and procedures.
x(C2,KP,k) Equals to 1, if the leaders and some boundary spanners within the participating organizations play the following roles; other-
wise, equals to 0.
• Note: leaders in the participating organizations play the supervisory role by conveying information to their subordinates
about the benefits and importance of working together. In this regard, boundary spanners within the participating organizations
foster linkages between the organizations.
x(C2,IS,k) Equals to 1, if the participants establish formal communication channels to exchange information across and within their organi-
zations; otherwise, equals to 0.
x(C2,DM,k) Equals to 1, if the process for decision-making is centralized, where a particular participant or a group of participants dominates
the process; otherwise, equals to 0.
x(C2,CR,k) Equals to 1, if some conflict arises and a third-party facilitator remembers the participants that the collective group should
respect the individual objectives; otherwise, equals to 0.
x(C2,RA,k) Equals to 1, if financial assets and physical property are shared, which enhances the participants’ abilities to achieve their indi-
vidual objectives; otherwise, equals to 0.
x(C2,ST,k) Equals to 1, if the participants evaluate which hardware or software system is compatible to enhance their abilities to achieve
their individual objectives; otherwise, equals to 0.
x(C2,TR,k) Equals to 1, if the leaders in the participating organizations work together to create partnerships that rely on trust; otherwise,
equals to 0.
• Note: in coordination, the successful sharing of resources and services requires a certain degree of trust. Also, trust between
the participating organizations reduces conflict between them.

13
76498 Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514

Table 6  Operationalization of the ten variables related to a collaborative partnership

Variable name Operationalization of the variable

x(C3,OD,k) Equals to 1, if the two conditions hold true about the structure of the partnership; otherwise, equals to 0.
(a) The participants adopt a holistic approach to become interdependent and develop a shared power structure, aiming to
address their collective objectives.
(b) All participants have equal voting rights when making a decision.
x(C3,FA,k) Equals to 1, if the participants create both formal and informal agreements as collective efforts are developed between them;
otherwise, equals to 0.
• Note: On the one hand, the informal agreements contribute to the evolution of the collaboration. In other words, informal
agreements govern the changes in the partnership as the domain of the problem shifts, partners change, and the arrangement is
modified. On the other hand, the formal agreements contributes to the stability of the collaboration by bringing the partici-
pants together.
x(C3,APO,k) Equals to 1, if the participants forgo some of their autonomy to establish collective objectives and develop joint rules and poli-
cies to govern the collaborative partnership; otherwise, equals to 0.
• Note: the creation and maintenance of collaboration may be challenging because it involves many different participating
organizations with different perspectives. However, broadening the participants’ understanding of the collective objectives
enhances their integration and interdependence.
x(C3,KP,k) Equals to 1, if some voluntary conveners within the participating organizations select appropriate partners in their own or other
organizations to initiate the collective efforts; otherwise, equals to 0.
x(C3,IS,k) Equals to 1, if various channels for frequent and open communications are established to create an appropriate information shar-
ing process; otherwise, equals to 0.
• Note: the various communication channels in collaboration should play the following roles:
(a) Broadening the base of understanding and common knowledge between the participants to reduce the transaction costs of
the partnership
(b) Conveying information about the participants’ capabilities and resources to contribute to the collective efforts
(c) Facilitating the generation of new ideas, finding more effective procedures to work together and developing trust
x(C3,DM,k) Equals to 1, if the participants adopt a participatory decision-making process to determine the strategic direction and operational
decisions of the collective unit; otherwise, equals to 0.
• Note: the participatory process in collaboration should be based on the participants’ mutual consensus and commitment to
reduce the conflicts between the individual organizations. Transparency should be considered essential in this process because
the participants should use frequent interactions to develop shared rules, norms, and policies.
x(C3,CR,k) Equals to 1, if the participants work together to develop an internal conflict resolution procedure; otherwise, equals to 0.
x(C3,RA,k) Equals to 1, if the participants pool their resources to add synergy to the available resources; otherwise, equals to 0.
x(C3,ST,k) Equals to 1, if the information systems and databases of the participants are integrated to enhance linkages between them; other-
wise, equals to 0.
x(C3,TR,k) Equals to 1, if trust is essential for the creation and sustaining of the partnership; otherwise, equals to 0.
• Note: in collaboration, trust is essential because it facilitates developing collective efforts and objectives and mutual under-
standing and reduces the imbalances of power between the participants.

articles. Finally, H4 is tested in “Relationship between com-
plexity and partnership approach.”
The applicability of the McNamara framework
According to Table 7, Figs. 1, 2, and 3 reveal some important
facts about the distributions of the partnership approaches,
the participating stakeholders, and different facets of part-
nerships. The terms cooperation, coordination, and collabo-
ration may be used interchangeably. Hence, the label that
the articles used for describing the partnerships may not be
truly the same as the approach identified by the McNamara
framework.
Figure 1 reveals that the buyers’ cooperative approach
for sustainable sourcing partnerships is rare; even if the
approach is realized, it does not happen individually.
According to Fig. 2, the buyers’ partners for implementing
sustainable sourcing are mostly their suppliers. Finally,
Fig. 3 indicates that a wide variety of the ten facets has been
studied in the literature on sustainable sourcing, especially
in coordinative and collaborative partnerships.
We discuss the applicability of the framework. The dis-
cussion can provide some insights for responding to Ques-
tion 1. First, Fig. 3a and b shows that the ten facets of the
McNamara framework can describe a wide variety of aspects
of coordinative and collaborative partnerships, i.e., the two
common approaches of partnerships for sustainable sourcing.
Second, the McNamara framework can appropriately distin-
guish between different partnerships for sustainable sourcing
through suggesting a unique label on each partnership in the
literature. More specifically, the ten facets provide almost
consistent identification of the partnership approach. In other
words, if a partnership covers more than one facet in Table 7,
all of them have suggested the same label for that partnership

13
 Table 7  The synthesis of the literature on the buyers’ partnership for sustainable sourcing
Number (k) Article The buyer’s partner(s) Sustainable sourcing ∑jxi, j, k xi,j,k zk
context
1
i=C1 i=C2 i=C k=OD k=FA k=APO k=KP k=IS k=DM k=CR k=RA k=ST k=TR

1 Zarei et al. (2020) External stakeholders (e.g. Supplier compliance to 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

NGOs) standards
2 Awasthy and Hazra (2019) Suppliers Supplier’s safety condi- 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1
tions
3 Ateş et al. (2012) Suppliers Proactive environmental 0 0 4 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1
strategies
4 Carter and Carter (1998) Suppliers (coordination), Environmental purchasing 1 3 0 1 (C2) 1 (C1) 0 1 (C2) 0 0 0 0 1 (C2) 0 0
Other buyers (coopera-
tion)
5 Carter and Jennings (2002) Suppliers Purchasing social respon- 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0
sibility
6 Chan et al. (2013) Other buyers, together with Management of energy 0 2 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
the common supplier waste, raw material
waste, and air pollution
7 W. Clark et al. (2014) Suppliers Market-oriented sustain- 0 2 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
ability
8 Dai et al. (2014) Suppliers Green supply management 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0
9 De Giovanni (2014) Suppliers Remanufacturing 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0
Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514

10 Gimenez and Tachizawa Suppliers Sustainable practices 0 3 2 0 1 (C2) 0 1 (C2) 0 1 (C3) 0 1 (C3) 1 (C2) 0 1
(2012) (general)
11 Grekova et al. (2014) Consumers Externally oriented envi- 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
ronmental management
12 Hsueh (2014) Suppliers Corporate social respon- 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1
sibility
13 Klassen and Vachon (2003) Consumers The supply chain invest- 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1
ment on environmental
technologies
14 Lee and Kim (2011) Suppliers and consumers Green new product devel- 0 0 3 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1
opment
15 Lee and Klassen (2008) Suppliers Enhancing the environ- 0 6 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0
mental management
capabilities of suppliers
16 Lu et al. (2014) Other buyers Recycling 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0
17 Lu et al. (2012) Suppliers Socially sustainable sup- 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
plier development
18 Luo et al. (2014) Suppliers Green supply chain man- 0 0 4 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0
agement
19 Luzzini et al. (2015) Suppliers Sustainable supplier devel- 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1
opment, sustainable new
product development
20 Paulraj et al. (2014) Suppliers Environmental manage- 0 0 3 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0
ment programs
21 Sharif et al. (2014) Suppliers Sustainable supplier rela- 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0
tionship management

13
76499
 Table 7  (continued)
76500

Number (k) Article The buyer’s partner(s) Sustainable sourcing ∑jxi, j, k xi,j,k zk
context
i=C1 i=C2 i=C1 k=OD k=FA k=APO k=KP k=IS k=DM k=CR k=RA k=ST k=TR

13
22 Sheu and Gao (2014) Suppliers (reverse logistics Recycling 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
providers)
23 Subramanian et al. (2009) Suppliers Sustainable product 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0
design, remanufacturing
24 Vachon and Klassen (2007) Suppliers, consumers Pollution prevention and 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
pollution control
25 Vachon and Klassen (2008) Suppliers, consumers Sustainable practices 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
(general)
26 Caro et al. (2018) Other buyers Supplier compliance to 1 0 1 0 0 1 (C3) 0 0 0 0 1 (C1) 0 0 0
standards
27 Karaer et al. (2017) Suppliers Supplier environmental 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0
management
28 Orsdemir et al. (2019) Suppliers (collaboration), Supplier compliance to 0 2 2 1 (C3) 0 1 (C3) 0 0 1 (C2) 0 1 (C2) 0 0 1
other buyers (coordina- standards
tion)
29 Liu et al. (2018) Non-governmental organi- Sustainable supplier 0 0 2 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1
zations (NGOs) and development
suppliers
30 Kalkanci and Plambeck Suppliers (coordination), The supplier’s sustainabil- 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 (C1) 0 0 1 (C2) 0 0 0
(2020) other buyers (coopera- ity practices
tion)
31 Chen et al. (2020) Other buyers Supplier compliance to 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0
standards
32 Andriolo et al. (2015) Other buyers Emission reduction 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0
33 Ji et al. (2015) Suppliers Recycling 1 1 0 1 (C1) 0 0 0 0 0 1 (C2) 0 0 0 1
Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514
Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514
from cooperation, coordination, and collaboration. The only
exception is the work of Ji et al. (2015), which studied a
buyer-supplier partnership for using recycled materials in
production.1 The “organizational design” facet suggests
cooperation for this partnership (see “Cooperative partner-
ships for sustainable sourcing”). In contrast, the “conflict
resolution” facet suggests coordination for this partnership
(refer to “Conflict resolution in coordination”). The first and
second results indicate the validity of the McNamara frame-
work to identify and distinguish between different approaches
of partnership in sustainable sourcing.
Besides the validity of the framework, two analyses can
illustrate its necessity. First, the number of facets studied in
each of the individual articles indicates that the framework
is comprehensive. According to Table 7, the average facets
of partnership studied in the articles that cover the coop-
erative, coordinative, and collaborative approaches are only
equal to 1, 2.33, and 1.95 out of the ten facets, respectively.
The result indicate that the existingliterature fails to pro-
vide a comprehensive understanding of the structure of the
buyers’ partnerships with respect to McNamara framework.
Second, by referring to Table A-1 in the online appendix, it
is shown that the authors of the articles collected in Table 7
have not detected the true partnership approach in 44% (15
out of 34) of the relationships introduced in the articles.
Hence, the McNamara framework and its ten facets can help
the researchers and practitioners detect the true partnership
approach and the requirements for its adoption in different
situations. Even for situations in which the authors have
detected the true partnership approach, the ten facets can
help them obtain a comprehensive perspective for the struc-
ture of partnership, as the first analysis showed.
Cooperative partnerships for sustainable sourcing
According to the “organizational design” facet in the McNa-
mara framework, cooperative organizations remain inde-
pendent structures (McNamara 2012). Ji et al. (2015) studied
this facet and found that a cooperative partnership can be
established between a supplier and its buyer for procuring
the supplier’s raw materials from recycling operations. In the
partnership, the supplier and the buyer make independent
decisions. The supplier decides on whether or not to recycle
used materials for production. Furthermore, the buyer makes
a decision on whether or not to buy products produced using
the recycled materials.
1
Except Ji et al. (2015), there are some other articles in Table 7 in
which different facets represent different partnership approaches. For
these articles, the approach is mentioned in a parenthesis. However, in
contrast to Ji et al. (2015) that studied only one partnership mechanism,
the other articles studied different partnership mechanisms, and the fac-
ets can be used consistently to distinguish between them.
76501
According to the “formality of the agreement” facet in
the McNamara framework (McNamara 2012), the decision
to work together in a cooperative partnership is contingent
on the existence of opportunities for sharing information,
building capacity, or generating synergy for the participants.
Hence, the agreement for creating the cooperative partner-
ship is informal and non-binding. The participants work
together because they want to, not because their officials
told them to do so.
Carter and Carter (1998) studied the “formality of the
agreement” facet in cooperative partnerships between buy-
ers. The researchers introduced two types of environmental
sustainability initiatives. First, proactive initiatives refer
to active investments to develop new sustainable solutions
and technologies in advance (Kim and Chae 2021). Second,
reactive (end-of-pipe) initiatives refer to only selecting the
most sustainable solution or technology among the existing
solutions and technologies. Moreover, reactive initiatives
may be related to ones that are aimed at rectifying dam-
ages imposed after a social and environmental scandal (Kim
and Chae 2021; Zarei and Rasti-Barzoki 2022). Carter and
Carter (1998) found that there is no need for a formal agree-
ment among cooperative buyers to work with regulators to
develop standards encouraging proactive environmental
solutions and technologies. This implies that only when
such a cooperation exempts the buyers from the adoption
of reactive, end-of-pipe environmental solutions, the buyers
are willing to adopt it.
According to the “information sharing” facet in the
McNamara framework (McNamara, 2012), cooperative
organizations discuss a wide range of topics. Such dis-
cussions create an informal communication channel for
sharing basic information, which is usually withheld in
the case of no cooperation. Information sharing is not
generally disrupted if a participating individual leaves
the discussion. Kalkanci and Plambeck (2020) studied
this facet in a buyer-supplier cooperative partnership. To
enhance the buyer’s learning from the supplier’s social
and environmental impacts, the researchers found that
some buyers commit to source the products from a sup-
plier that cooperates with them. The cooperation is cre-
ated to collect data, identify social and environmental
problems, and share the gathered information with the
buyers.
According to the “resource allocation” facet in the
McNamara framework (McNamara 2012), only informa-
tion is shared in a cooperative partnership. This means that
the sharing and pooling of the participants’ resources do
not happen. Caro et al. (2018) studied this facet and found
that, to audit a common supplier, the buyers can develop a
shared auditing mechanism. In this mechanism, the buyers
only share their auditing reports with others, and no financial
or resource exchange happens.
13
76502
Fig. 1  The distribution of the
buyers’ partnership type for 20
sustainable sourcing 18
16
Number of articles
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
Only Coordination
Collaboration
According to Fig. 1, cooperative partnerships are not
common for promoting sustainable sourcing. According to
Fig. 1, only four articles have addressed cooperative partner-
ships, particularly along with the other two types of partner-
ship. The McNamara framework can explain this trend in
the academic literature and in the real world. Resolving sus-
tainability and sustainable sourcing issues requires sharing
critical resources and knowledge between different stake-
holders, especially in global supply chains (Liu et al. 2018;
Liu et al. 2019a). In this regard, cooperative partnerships
between stakeholders are not effective and thus are not com-
mon for promoting sustainable sourcing, as they lack the
exchange of resources between the participating organiza-
tions. Hence, H1 is rejected.
Coordinative partnerships for sustainable sourcing
In “Organizational design in coordination,” “Formal-
ity of the agreement in coordination,” “Key personnel
in coordination,” “Information sharing in coordination,”
“Decision-making in coordination,” “Conflict resolution
in coordination,” “Resource allocation in coordination,”
“Systems thinking in coordination,” and “Trust in coor-
dination,” we discuss different facets of the buyers’ coor-
dinative partnerships for sustainable sourcing. Here, an
overview of these partnerships is provided; based on this
content analysis, H2 is supported.
Several articles have investigated the effectiveness
and drivers of coordinative partnerships for sustainable
sourcing. Carter and Carter (1998) found that the buy-
ers’ coordination with their upstream suppliers is more
effective to improve environmental sustainability than
cooperation with competing buyers, even if the buyers
cooperate with each other to facilitate adopting proac-
tive environmental technologies. An increase in supply
uncertainty, such as the probability of an environmental or
social scandal, does not facilitate the buyer’s coordination
with suppliers. Instead, it increases the buyer’s adoption of
risk minimization policies, such as dual sourcing (Carter
and Carter 1998). Also, a coordinative reverse revenue
13
Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514
Only Cooperation and Cooperation and Coordination and
coordination collaboration collaboration
sharing contract is effective when its transaction costs are
low enough and it can generate fair profits for the buyer
and the supplier (De Giovanni 2014).
Karaer et al. (2017) found that a coordinative partnership
can be established between a buying firm and its supplier(s)
using a platform for sharing necessary information and cost
sharing contracts. From the sustainability perspective, such a
coordinative partnership is often more viable when the sup-
plier uses a monopoly supplier. In the case of competition
between different suppliers, the viability of the partnership
becomes more restricted.
Orsdemir et al. (2019) found that the establishment of
a buyer-supplier coordinative partnership depends on three
factors: (1) the level of external auditing efforts, (2), the
availability of a coordinative partnership between the buyer
and other buyers, and (3) the degree of demand externalities.
Demand externality refers to the adverse or positive effects
of a responsibility violation from a buyer on the demands
of other buyers. The researchers found that a coordinative
buyer-supplier partnership is established under moderate-to-
high external auditing efforts when the coordinative buyer-
buyer partnership is possible. Moreover, the buyer not only
coordinates its decisions with the supplier in such a case,
but also may activate its coordinative partnership with the
other buyers via sharing its responsibly sourced products.
The coordination with other buyers in this case is contingent
on that the demand externalities are not too positive.
According to Awasthy and Hazra (2019), buyers can
adopt two types of coordinative partnerships with their sup-
pliers: accord and alliance. In the accord mechanism, the
buyer and its supplier exert joint sustainability efforts, while
the buyer provides funding for the supplier’s sustainability
efforts in the alliance mechanism. The researchers found
that the effectiveness of coordination and the equilibrium
choice between these two types of partnerships depend on
the agent’s capability in enhancing sustainability and the
synergetic effects between their efforts. The results indicate
that in order for the accord mechanism to induce both part-
ners’ efforts, the supplier’s capability must have a moderate
value. Moreover, if both partners’ capabilities are low, the
Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514
Fig. 2  The distribution of the
buyer's partners for sustainable
sourcing
6%
Suppliers (only)
Other buyers (only)
Suppliers and other buyers
Suppliers and consumers
supplier prefers the alliance mechanism. If the buyer’s capa-
bility is high and the supplier’s capability is low, the supplier
prefers alliance. From the buyer’s perspective, low capability
of its supplier guarantees that it will prefer a cooperative
partnership from accord and alliance. In this case, if the
buyer’s capability is moderate, it will prefer alliance over
accord. Finally, from a sustainability perspective, a buyer-
supplier coordinative partnership is effective to compensate
for the supplier’s low capability, only if the synergetic effects
of this partnership are high enough.
Organizational design in coordination
Some linkages are created between coordinative organiza-
tions to determine their roles and responsibilities and share
a specific resource or skill for specific collective efforts
(McNamara 2012). Carter and Carter (1998) found that close
relationships between buyers and their suppliers facilitate
asking suppliers to comply with waste reduction targets. Lee
and Klassen (2008) found that there are some synergistic
linkages between a buyer and its supplier to enhance the
supplier’s environmental capabilities.
Zarei et al. (2020) found that a buyer has two alternative
when designing its auditing policy to support sustainable
sourcing: a stringent policy, called the strong incentive com-
patibility (SIC) mechanism, and a lenient policy, called the
weak incentive compatibility (WIC) mechanism. Besides the
buyer, some external stakeholders also audit the supplier,
and their tendency is to enhance their auditing efforts with
the aim of increasing supply chain transparency. If the SIC
mechanism is effective to support sustainable sourcing, the
external stakeholders should encourage the buyer to choose
76503
9%
3%
12%
55%
12%
3%
External stakeholders only (e.g. NGOs)
Consumers (only)
Suppliers and external stakeholders
the SIC mechanism. The selection of this mechanism ena-
bles the external stakeholders to freely increase supply chain
transparency. In contrast, if the external stakeholders cannot
convince the buyer to choose the SIC mechanism, it may
choose the WIC mechanism, which limits the external stake-
holders’ capability to increase their auditing efforts. Hence,
the external stakeholders should create some linkages with
the buyer. These linkages will facilitate convincing the buyer
to choose the most appropriate auditing mechanism from the
external stakeholders’ point of view.
Formality of the agreement in coordination
Coordinative organizations establish more formal agree-
ments to pursue collective efforts and collective objectives
that are compatible with their individual objectives (McNa-
mara 2012). Chan et al. (2013) found that a supply chain net-
work that consists of different buyers and their common sup-
plier can formally synchronize the buyers’ ordering cycles.
This synchronization helps the buyers target environmental
concerns. The concerns include minimizing air pollution
and raw material wastage. This coordination is economically
essential for the supply chain members to gain a competitive
advantage.
Clark et al. (2014) found that, by formally sharing infor-
mation from consumers with suppliers, buyers coordinate
green purchasing activities with a market orientation aiming
to improve consumer satisfaction. Gimenez and Tachizawa
(2012) found that the key elements of a coordinative partner-
ships between buyers and suppliers are the clear, formalized,
and structured objectives and responsibilities of each part-
ner. According to Lee and Klassen (2008), an environmental
13
76504 Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514

Fig. 3  The distribution of the

9 9
ten facets of partnership for dif- 8 8
ferent approaches

Number of articles

Number of articles
7 7
6 6
5 5
4 4
3 3
2 2
1 1
0 0

(a) Collaborative partnership (b) Coordinative partnership

Number of articles
2

0
OD FA APO KP IS DM CR RA ST TR

(c) Cooperative partnership

management system should provide daily business routines
to specify the role and responsibility of each partner. The
buyer is responsible to provide effective education and train-
ing for its employees and its supplier, while the supplier
must adopt sustainable production standards.
Key personnel in coordination
Leaders in coordinative organizations play the supervisory
role by conveying information to their subordinates about the
benefits and importance of working together. In this regard,
boundary spanners within the participating organizations
foster linkages between the organizations (McNamara 2012).
Carter and Carter (1998) found that procurement personnel
within the buyer’s organization perform inbound logistics
functions. They are located at the starting point of the for-
ward flow of materials and are in an advantageous position
to adopt resource reduction policies. Accordingly, procure-
ment personnel can serve as the boundary spanner role
to extend the buyer’s environmental activities within the
whole supply chain. Gimenez and Tachizawa (2012) found
that coordinative partnerships between buyers and suppliers
require top management strategic support for enhancing the
intra-organizational and inter-organizational interactions and
capabilities. Moreover, purchasing staff within the buyer’s
organization act as boundary spanners to work with and
assess the suppliers.
Information sharing in coordination
Coordinative organizations establish formal communi-
cation channels aiming to exchange information across
and within their organizations (McNamara 2012). Clark
et al. (2014) found that buyers gather important informa-
tion from their consumers about their preference of eco-
friendly products. Then, using a formal and integrated
approach, they share this information with suppliers
to coordinate green purchasing and market orientation
practices. Lee and Klassen (2008) found that enhanc-
ing a supplier’s environmental management capabilities
is realized through the following formal communication
channels: (a) environmental reporting, (b) management
of environmental claims, and (c) environmental conser-
vation programs.
Subramanian et al. (2009) found that if partners in a
buyer-supplier coordinative partnership aim to achieve both
economic and environmental benefits, they should establish
some communication channels so that information asymme-
try about the buyer’s consumption pattern of the product is
disappeared. Karaer et al. (2017) suggested that Material IQ
(MIQ) is a novel decision support system to help suppliers
share the data of chemical materials in their products with
buyers and final consumers. The system is designed by the
GreenBlue company. Karaer et al. (2017) suggested that a
buyer can adopt MIQ to communicate with its supplier(s).

13
Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514
Decision‑making in coordination
The process for decision-making in a coordinative partner-
ship is centralized, where a particular participant or a group
of participants dominates the process (McNamara 2012).
Awasthy and Hazra (2019) found that buyers can adopt two
types of coordinative partnership with their suppliers: accord
and alliance. In these partnerships, the buyer dominates
the decision-making process as it acts as the Stackelberg
leader of the decision-making process. For accord, the sup-
plier decides on the amount of investment for identifying,
evaluating, and management of safety conditions. The buyer
decides on the amount of investment for establishing preven-
tion plans and safety training (in terms of the period length
of training and the number of training personnel) to enhance
the supplier’s know-how about safety conditions. The buyer-
supplier coordination on these decisions may create synergy
for safety improvement. The synergy is measured by the
extent of the buyer’s close involvement in the partnership
for safety improvement.
Chan et al. (2013) and Andriolo et al. (2015) found that a
centralized decision-making process is established between
buyers and their common supplier to decide on a common
order cycle for the buyers. Hsueh (2014) found that a buyer
in a coordinative buyer-supplier relationship is the dominant
partner and has the responsibility to exert moral control on
the supplier. Lee and Klassen (2008) found that in the buyer-
supplier coordinative partnership, the dominant buyer pro-
vides support for the much smaller supplier because of the
supplier’s deficiency in internal resources. Orsdemir et al.
(2019) studied vertical buyer-supplier integration. In this
integration, the buyer has complete knowledge and control
of the supplier’s decisions and operation, which reduces the
supplier’s risk of unsustainable production.
Conflict resolution in coordination
Since participants in a coordinative partnership aim to opti-
mize the competing individual objectives, some conflict may
arise. A third-party facilitator may remember the partici-
pants that the collective group should respect the individual
objectives (McNamara 2012). De Giovanni (2014) found
that a reverse revenue sharing contract acts as a procedure
for coordinating the buyer and its supplier. The contract
requires an auditing mechanism to control the monetary
flows between the mentioned supply chain members. This
auditing mechanism is usually external to the coordinative
partnership (Heese and Kemahlıoğlu-Ziya 2016; Heese and
Kemahlioglu-Ziya 2014) and imposes significant transac-
tion costs on the partnership. According to Ji et al. (2015), a
buyer and a supplier can develop a purchasing contract for
facilitating the usage of recycled materials in the supplier’s
production process. If a partner breaches the purchasing
76505
contract, it has to pay a penalty, determined externally, to
the other partner.
Resource allocation in coordination
Financial assets and physical property are shared in coor-
dinative partnerships. This type of resource allocation
enhances the participants’ abilities to achieve their indi-
vidual objectives (McNamara 2012). As mentioned in
“Decision-making in coordination,” Awasthy and Hazra
(2019) proposed two types of buyer-supplier coordinative
partnership: accord and alliance. The researchers found
that the alliance mechanism provides funds to suppliers for
improving safety conditions in their factories. Moreover, in
the accord mechanism, the European buyers create a dedi-
cated and expert team to train suppliers by transferring the
buyers’ knowledge, standards, and protocols about safety
conditions.
Hsueh (2014) found that a portion of the buyer’s rev-
enue, as a financial asset, can be shared with the supplier
to enhance the supply chain corporate social responsibil-
ity. Lee and Klassen (2008) found that direct involvement
of buyers with their suppliers acts as an effective mecha-
nism for transferring critical resources and knowledge from
buyers to suppliers. Subramanian et al. (2009) found that
the buyer-supplier sharing of the buyer’s usage costs of the
products during their coordinative partnership can affect the
replacement frequency of the product, which has important
environmental benefits. Karaer et al. (2017) found that a
portion of the supplier’s expenses incurred by investment in
its environmental performance can be shared with the buyer
with the aim of incentivizing the supplier for this investment.
According to Orsdemir et al. (2019), a buyer may share
its responsibly produced products to a coordinative buyer,
known as horizontal sourcing. This willingness to share
originates from negative externalities imposed on a buyer
because of the discovery of unsustainable sourcing from
other coordinative buyer(s). Kalkanci and Plambeck (2020)
found that coordinative buyers share the costs of joint audit-
ing and joint learning from the supplier’s social and environ-
mental impacts. According to Andriolo et al. (2015), when
ordering from their common supplier, the buyers’ haulage
sharing approach could be highly effective from both emis-
sion reduction and economic perspectives.
Systems thinking in coordination
The participants in a coordinative partnership evaluate
which hardware or software system is compatible to enhance
their abilities to achieve their individual objectives (McNa-
mara 2012). Carter and Carter (1998) found that in the coor-
dinative partnership, the buyers and the suppliers evaluate,
design, and adopt new environmental technologies, whether
13
76506
the technologies are proactive or end-of-pipe. The alterna-
tive technologies include reuse and recycling of materials
and new environmentally friendly materials. De Giovanni
(2014) found that investing in an appropriate information
system is necessary for the coordinative reverse revenue
sharing contract. It can facilitate adoption of controlling
procedures, reduce the complexity, and overcome difficult
implementation of the contract. Gimenez and Tachizawa
(2012) found that coordinative participants adopt the key
performance indicators and the performance measure-
ment systems of different functional areas, particularly the
purchasing function, aiming to nurture new sustainability
initiatives. According to Lee and Klassen (2008), an envi-
ronmental management system is effective for training and
educating suppliers to enhance their environmental man-
agement capabilities. As mentioned in Karaer et al. (2017),
Material IQ (MIQ) is a novel decision support system to help
suppliers share data of chemical materials in their products
with buyers and final consumers. The system is designed by
the GreenBlue company. A buyer thinks about whether or
not the adoption of MIQ to communicate with its supplier(s)
is environmentally beneficial.
Trust in coordination
According to the McNamara framework (McNamara 2012),
leaders in coordinative organizations work together to cre-
ate partnerships that rely on trust. A successful share of
resources and services requires a certain degree of trust.
Moreover, trust between the participating organizations
reduces conflict between them. According to Awasthy and
Hazra (2019), the existence of a funding coefficient in an
alliance mechanism ensures that the supplier trust the buyer
in a sense that that the supplier will receive funding accord-
ing to its sustainability efforts. This degree of trust may
stimulate the supplier to exert more effort than in the case
of no coordination.
Collaborative partnerships for sustainable sourcing
In “Organizational design in collaboration,” “Formality
of the agreement in collaboration,” “Autonomy of the par-
ticipating organizations in collaboration,” “Key personnel
in collaboration,” “Information sharing in collaboration,”
“Decision-making in collaboration,” “Conflict resolution in
collaboration,” “Resource allocation in collaboration,” and
“Systems thinking in collaboration,” we discuss different
facets of the buyers’ collaborative partnerships for sustain-
able sourcing. Here, an overview of these partnerships is
provided; based on this content analysis, H3 is supported.
Several articles have discussed under what condi-
tions collaborative partnerships are available and effec-
tive for sustainable sourcing. Sharif et al. (2014) found
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Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514
that collaborative partnerships are suggested in highly
uncertain situations where transaction frequency is high.
Demand uncertainties and competitive pressures from the
market threaten Chinese suppliers and buyers. Neverthe-
less, as mentioned in Luo et al. (2014), the Guanxi culture,
an East Asian culture, pushes Chinese suppliers and buyers
to work together to implement environmental sustainabil-
ity practices. Collaboration with suppliers is more required
and available for buyers in the electronics and automotive
industries that select suppliers from developing countries,
than the ones in the chemicals, plastics, food, and beverage
sectors (Ateş et al. 2012).
Supply chain upstream collaboration (collaboration
between buyers and suppliers) is more effective for enhanc-
ing process-based performance, while product-based perfor-
mance can be enhanced through downstream collaboration
(Vachon and Klassen 2008). Liu et al. (2018) found that
buyers require additional resources for sustainability initia-
tives, especially when their businesses cover a wide range
of geographical regions and industrial activities (e.g., retail-
ing, grocery, and food). In this sense, collaborative partner-
ships are effective for establishing these initiatives as they
facilitate resource pooling and open and frequent informa-
tion sharing, which synergizes the participants’ individual
and collective efforts (please see Table A-3 in the online
appendix).
Organizational design in collaboration
According to the McNamara framework (McNamara 2012),
collaborative participants adopt a holistic approach to
become interdependent and develop a shared power struc-
ture, aiming to address their collective objectives. In this
regard, all participants have equal voting rights when making
a decision. Lee and Kim (2011) found that joint development
of an environmental solution, including green new product
development, requires direct involvement of all stakehold-
ers, whether it is a consumer or is a supplier. This implies
equal voting powers of all stakeholders. In recent years, as
mentioned in Sheu and Gao (2014), some governments have
legislated take-back and extended producer responsibility
laws to foster circular economy. Such government interven-
tion increases the chance of a reverse logistics provider to
exert countervailing bargaining power. This ensures a shared
power structure in the collaborative partnership between the
buyer and the reverse logistics provider.
Formality of the agreement in collaboration
According to the McNamara framework (McNamara 2012),
collaborative participants create both formal and informal
agreements as collective efforts are developed between
them. On the one hand, the informal agreements contribute
Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514
to the evolution of the collaboration. In other words, infor-
mal agreements govern the changes in the partnership as
the domain of the problem shifts, partners change, and the
arrangement is modified. On the other hand, the formal
agreements contribute to the stability of the collaboration
by bringing the participants together.
In a collaborative buyer-supplier relationship, Luo
et al. (2014) found that the buyer may formally ask its
supplier to implement information technologies aiming to
enhance the total supply chain performance. On the other
hand, buyers and suppliers easily collaborate in cases
with unanticipated changes in the business environment,
where formal agreements are ineffective to govern their
collaboration. This indicates that informal agreements
between them are necessary for developing collective
efforts between them.
Paulraj et al. (2014) found that long-term relationship
orientation in a collaborative buyer-supplier partnership
implies a two-faceted agreement between the partners.
The agreement is both a formal vertical integration and an
informal trust-based commitment. The ability of this type
of agreement to instill mutual commitment and trust makes
it costlier to terminate than a purely formal contract.
Autonomy of the participating organizations
in collaboration
According to the McNamara framework (McNa-
mara 2012), collaborative participants forgo some of their
autonomy to establish collective objectives and develop
joint rules and policies to govern the collaborative part-
nership. The creation and maintenance of the partnership
may be challenging because it involves many different
participating organizations with different perspectives.
However, broadening the participants’ understanding of
the collective objectives enhances their integration and
interdependence.
Ateş et al. (2012) found that the buyers’ proactive envi-
ronmental strategies require highly comprehensive and com-
plex social processes than a simple compliance strategy, so
that buyers require investing in integration with their sup-
pliers. Grekova et al. (2014) found that buyers forgo some
of their autonomy and work closely with their consumers to
reduce the supply chain environmental impacts. Since the
buyers’ and the consumers’ perspectives are quite differ-
ent, developing the shared understanding of the partners’
responsibilities is necessary. During this collaboration, the
buyers may modify their product specifications, transporta-
tion channels, and packaging and reverse logistics activities.
To audit a common supplier, Caro et al. (2018) found that
collaborative buyers can develop a joint auditing mecha-
nism in which they conduct joint supply chain audits, share
76507
the total auditing expenses, and charge a collective penalty
in the case that the supplier fails to pass their audit. Liu
et al. (2018) found that there may exist a multi-stakeholder
engagement initiative in supplier development, in which
buyers forgo some of their autonomy. In this regard, a par-
ticipating NGO contributes to the buyer’s decisions and
shapes and co-designs the preliminary directions and objec-
tives of supplier development practices. The NGO also helps
the buyer understand which sustainability issues from water,
carbon, child labor etc. needs to be prioritized during the
supplier development practices. This role of the NGO to
direct the buyer’s decisions is called the driver role.
Key personnel in collaboration
Voluntary conveners within collaborative organizations
select appropriate partners in their own or other organiza-
tions to initiate the collective efforts (McNamara 2012).
Ateş et al. (2012) found that the term “proactive” in the
buyers’ proactive environmental strategy indicates the vol-
untary nature of the strategy. Hence, the establishment of
voluntary conveners within the buyer’s and the supplier’s
organizations is needed. They develop common goals and
hold joint problem-solving sessions to achieve these goals.
Vachon and Klassen (2008) found that voluntary conveners
in the purchasing, reverse logistics, product stewardship, and
product development departments initiate shared environ-
mental planning and joint environmental goal setting.
Information sharing in collaboration
According to the McNamara framework (McNamara 2012),
to reduce the transaction costs of the partnership, it is nec-
essary to broaden the base of understanding and common
knowledge between the participants. Various channels for
frequent and open communications can create an appropri-
ate information sharing process and satisfy this necessity.
Through this process, information is conveyed about the
participants’ capabilities and resources to contribute to the
collective efforts. The process also facilitates the genera-
tion of new ideas, finding more effective procedures to work
together, and developing trust.
Ateş et al. (2012) found that a collective unit, which con-
sists of voluntary conveners, requires shared information to
better use the shared personnel and equipment and evaluate
the supplier. The communication channel can be the buyer-
supplier interactions when visiting the suppliers’ plants.
According to Dai et al. (2014), collaboration between buy-
ers and suppliers requires strong communication, through
assistance and training channels, aiming to achieve mutual
understanding on the supply chain environmental problems.
According to Lee and Kim (2011), the suppliers’ techni-
cal expertise and clear problem detection from the buyer in
13
76508
specifications of product design create a great communica-
tion channel for sharing information. This channel is vital for
innovative and timely new product development.
Lu et al. (2012) found that smooth communication in the
buyer-supplier collaborative partnership provides a shared
vision for the partners. Through this communication chan-
nel, operation knowledge and tacit manufacturing are shared
between the partners. Suppliers can also learn corporate
social responsibility knowledge such as the basic concepts,
implementation guidelines, related benchmarks and prac-
tices, and outcome measurement procedures. The commu-
nication between partners can guarantee the achievement of
long-term sustainability targets.
Luo et al. (2014) found that high transaction frequencies
between buyers and suppliers facilitate frequent and open
communications between them. These communications help
them find and invest in new business processes and use their
capabilities to business and product problems. Paulraj et al.
(2014) found that buyer-supplier collaborative partnerships
establish communication channels for conveying a clear per-
ception of each partner’s operations and long-term mutual
eagerness to discover the similarities and differences in their
processes. Sharif et al. (2014) found that face-to-face com-
munication provides the advantage of exploring and building
relationships with new suppliers, leading to higher produc-
tivity. This result may be due to the fact that communications
help the partners identify their capabilities and resources to
contribute to the collective efforts.
According to Vachon and Klassen (2007), two types of
supply chain collaboration exist, each of which requires dif-
ferent levels of communications between the partners. The
first type, called logistical integration, refers to tactical deci-
sions and activities and is associated to the logistical and
delivery management of products. The second type of col-
laboration, called technological integration, is associated to
more strategic decisions and activities, including process
re-engineering and new product development. Technologi-
cal integration requires more communication to share tacit
technical know-how compared to logistical integration.
Decision‑making in collaboration
According to the McNamara framework (McNamara 2012),
collaborative organizations adopt a participatory decision-
making process to determine the strategic direction and
operational decisions of the collective unit. The process is
based on the participants’ consensus and commitment to
reduce the conflicts between the individual organizations.
Transparency is essential in this process because the par-
ticipants should use frequent interactions to develop shared
rules, norms, and policies.
Ateş et al. (2012) found that buyers with proactive envi-
ronmental strategies should join with their suppliers to invest
13
Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514
in strategic areas such as greener and sustainable practices.
Such a strategic collaborative partnership helps them go
beyond simply complying with regulations and adopting pol-
lution prevention techniques. Dai et al. (2014) found that the
decision-making process in a buyer-supplier collaboration
relies on top management support to determine the appropri-
ate strategic direction aiming to maximize the participants’
commitment for implementing green purchasing activities.
According to Gimenez and Tachizawa (2012), strategic col-
laborative partnerships in the supply chain mainly rely on
(shared) norms and trust.
According to Klassen and Vachon (2003), buyers and
consumers can jointly create a participatory decision-making
environment. This environment leads to the following efforts
from the buyers: (a) investment in environmental technolo-
gies, (b) technological innovation, (c) better resource man-
agement, and (d) adoption of voluntary industry-wide codes
and standards. These efforts facilitate complying with regu-
lations and meeting consumer expectations. The collabora-
tion between buyers and consumers may be so strong that it
fosters more proactive sustainability solutions ahead of these
regulations and expectations.
Lu et al. (2014) found that collaborative buyers can adopt
a joint decision-making process and a fair profit allocation
scheme to guarantee the participation and commitment of
all buyers. The process reduces total recycling costs and
encourages the partners to increase their efficiency through
economies of scale in their operations. According to Lu et al.
(2012), a buyer-supplier collaborative partnership is based
on co-adoption of corporate social responsibility practices,
which are a type of participatory decision-making process.
These practices are expected to enhance the supplier’s com-
mitment and capabilities to implement corporate social
responsibility.
Luo et al. (2014) found that belief to the Guanxi cul-
ture, an East Asian culture, and high transaction frequencies
enhance mutual commitment between buyers and sellers,
leading to their willingness to engage in collective objec-
tives. Luzzini et al. (2015) found that buyers in a collabora-
tive buyer-supplier partnership requires creation of a wide
range of relationships with their suppliers in the long run.
During the collaboration, coherent and transparent activities
across different departments are conducted to draw together
sustainability ideas and to provide learning, expertise,
knowledge, and innovation for the participants.
Conflict resolution in collaboration
While the participants of coordinative partnerships require
a third-party facilitator, the participants of collaborative
partnerships work together to develop an internal conflict
resolution procedure (McNamara, 2012). Carter and Jen-
nings (2002) found that trust between buyers and suppliers
Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514
results in more forms of conflict resolution in their collabo-
rative partnerships. This implies the existence of internal
and jointly developed conflict resolution procedures in their
partnerships.
Resource allocation in collaboration
Collaborative organizations pool their resources to add syn-
ergy to the available resources (McNamara 2012). Gimenez
and Tachizawa (2012) found that a buyer that implements
sustainable practices requires enough resources to develop
the appropriate initiatives. It also requires the supplier’s
strong commitment toward these sustainability practices.
Hence, pooling of the buyer’s and the supplier’s resources
is a great solution to enhance the productivity of available
resources and the partners’ commitment though adding syn-
ergy to the partnership. Lu et al. (2014) found that collabora-
tive buyers pool their recycling facilities in their collabora-
tive partnerships.
Paulraj et al. (2014) found that a buyer-supplier collabo-
ration highlights the buyers’ willingness to pool and devote
resources and financial commitments, if the aim is to achieve
the environmental targets of the suppliers. Liu et al. (2018)
found that the complex nature of sustainability issues and
dynamic changes in business directions push buying firms
to find or establish new capacities for supplier development
programs (Rueda-Manzanares et al. 2008). However, the
buyers do not possess sufficient resources and knowledge
to provide these capacities alone. Also, suppliers that par-
ticipate in traditional supplier development practices often
receive minimum support from buyers. Hence, both buyers
and suppliers require further support to address complex
sustainability issues. In this regard, some NGOs serve as a
facilitator role. They collaborate with buyers to deliver sup-
plier development programs to the suppliers by allocating
financial or technical support.
Chen et al. (2020) found that two collaborative buyers
can establish a stable collaboration for jointly auditing their
suppliers, pooling their own auditing resources together, and
fairly sharing the auditing costs. Such collaboration helps
them decide better about which supplier(s) to be selected for
auditing, and how much efforts to be exerted for auditing.
Systems thinking in collaboration
According to the McNamara framework (McNamara 2012), the
information systems and databases of participants in a collabo-
rative partnership are integrated to enhance linkages between
them. Sharif et al. (2014) found that a buyer-supplier collabora-
tive partnership during the supplier relationship management
process relies on (integrated) software for managing informa-
tion flow within the whole supply chain.
76509
Trust in collaboration
According to the McNamara framework (McNa-
mara 2012), trust is essential for the creation and sustain-
ing of collaborative partnerships. It facilitates developing
collective efforts and objectives and mutual understanding
and reduces the imbalances of power between the partici-
pants. Carter and Jennings (2002) found that the buyers’
trust in their suppliers is an important antecedent to buyer-
supplier collaborations because it enhances the buyers’
willingness to provide assistance and jointly solve social
responsibility problems when they arise. Dai et al. (2014)
found that trust is essential for developing and maintaining
the required commitment and organizational resources for
a buyer-supplier collaboration that is aimed at implement-
ing green purchasing activities.
Lee and Kim (2011) found that suppliers highly require
a trusting relationship with their buyers when participat-
ing in a collaborative partnership for sustainable new
product development. The necessity originates from the
fact that the supplier has to share critical information and
details about their products, which may be in conflict with
their perspective of keeping technological leadership in
the market. Hence, trust can form mutual understanding
between the partners in a sense that the partners expe-
rience a power-balanced relationship and nobody will
exploit the shared information. According to Luo et al.
(2014), belief to the Guanxi culture enhances mutual trust
between buyers and sellers, leading to their willingness to
engage in collective objectives.
Relationship between complexity and partnership
approach
In the last column of Table 7, variable zk indicates whether
complexity is inherent in the sustainable sourcing issue or
solution studied in article k. For articles with zk = 1, the quo-
tations indicating the complexity are provided in Table A-2
of the online appendix. As mentioned in “Operationalization
of the research variables,” variable yi, k indicates whether
partnership approach i is covered in article k. In this sub-
section, we investigate the correlation coefficients between
variables yi, k and zk. The results are provided in Table 8.
The results in Table 8 indicate that there is a strong
positive relationship between adopting a collaboration
partnership and the complexity inherent in the sustain-
ability context. On the other hand, the negative correlation
coefficients indicate that the complexity of the context co-
occurs with not adopting the cooperative and coordinative
partnership approaches. These results suggest that the buy-
ers’ collaborative partnership is strongly more effective
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76510
than cooperative and coordinative partnerships in case of
complex sustainability contexts, supporting H4.
Discussions and implications
The present article allows us to obtain a comprehensive
knowledge of the buyers’ partnerships for sustainable
sourcing. Chen et al. (2017) focused only on the out-
comes of partnerships for supply chain sustainability and
detected different partners involved in these partnerships.
The present article contributes to the literature by offer-
ing a valid, necessary, and comprehensive framework for
studying the partnerships. The framework suggests that the
nature of partnership can be cooperation, coordination, or
collaboration. Moreover, it suggests that the structure of
a partnership is composed of ten interconnected facets.
The present article reveals two findings regarding coop-
erative partnerships for sustainable sourcing. First, infor-
mation sharing is the main facet of cooperation. Second,
cooperation is not effective for sustainable sourcing. These
results are almost consistent with some insights in the
work of Yang and Lien (2018). The researchers found that
information sharing cannot improve environmental perfor-
mance through relieving the partners’ bounded rationality.
We contribute to the insights by explaining the reasons
that limit cooperation for being effective for sustainable
sourcing. Resolving sustainable sourcing issues requires
sharing critical resources and knowledge between differ-
ent stakeholders (Liu et al. 2018; Liu et al. 2019a). In
this regard, the framework predicts that cooperation is not
effective for sustainable sourcing as it lacks the exchange
of resources between the participating organizations.
According to the results, the key determinant factor for
the selection of the optimal partnership approach among
coordination and cooperation is the complexity of the sus-
tainable sourcing context. Collaboration is considered as
the preferred partnership approach if the context (i.e. issue
or solution) is evaluated as complex; otherwise, coordina-
tion is the preferred one. Some similar insights are evident
from the literature. Orsdemir et al. (2019) considered com-
plexity in the regulation environment or in the interac-
tion between the buyer and its customers as the driving
factor for the buyer-supplier collaboration. Furthermore,
finding some collective objectives is a complex task when
the partners have diverging objectives; the issue calls for
the adoption of a collaborative partnership (Lombardo
et al. 2022; Lubell 2015; McAllister and Taylor 2015;
Mina et al. 2022).
As mentioned above, the existing literature puts complex-
ity as the basis for distinguishing coordination and collabo-
ration partnerships. However, the existing literature fails to
explain how the complexity factor alter the characteristics
13
Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514
Table 8  The statistical relationship between complexity and partner-
ship approach
Corr(yC1, k, zk) (P-value) Corr(yC2, k, zk) (P-value) Corr(yC3, k, zk)
(P-value)
− 0.227 (0.184) − 0.362* (0.030) 0.479** (0.003)
*
Indicates that the correlation coefficient is significant at the 0.05
confidence level
**
Indicates that the correlation coefficient is significant at the 0.01
confidence level
of the sustainability solutions prescribed by coordination
and cooperation. Our results can fill this research gap. We
find that coordinative partnerships should be mainly initi-
ated at the tactical and operational levels to operate reac-
tive, end-of-pipe solutions for sustainable sourcing. Reac-
tive initiatives refer to only selecting the most sustainable
solution or technology among the existing solutions and
technologies. Moreover, reactive initiatives may be related
to ones that are aimed at rectifying damages imposed after
a social and environmental scandal (Kim and Chae 2021;
Zarei and Rasti-Barzoki 2022). The prescription of coordi-
nation indicates that the partners have almost converging
objectives. Thus, the partners can easily be jointly agreed
to sustainability to minimize the expenses of future reactive
efforts to rectify the unsustainable issues. This indicates that
no complex sustainability solution is needed in the case of
the partners’ almost aligned objectives.
In contrast, if the partners have diverging objectives,
they cannot easily agree on forming some joint reactive,
end-of-pipe solutions. This is because no partner accepts
its responsibility in the realized unsustainable issue and its
share in the expenses incurred. Hence, collaborative part-
nerships between different stakeholders should be mainly
initiated at the strategic level to design complex proactive
solutions for sustainable sourcing. Proactive initiatives refer
to active investments to develop new sustainable solutions
and technologies in advance (Kim and Chae 2021). Informal
agreements, trusting relationships, and resource pooling in
collaborative partnerships help the partners increase their
commitments and capabilities to define some new collective
objectives and to overcome these strategic issues.
Some practical implications are also recommended based
on the theoretical results. The implications can help reorgan-
ize the supply chain structures and infrastructures to foster
the transition to sustainability. First, third-party auditors are
recommended to leave their sole auditing role and join some
supplier development initiatives. If the sustainability issue
is of high complexity, the initiative is suggested to include
buyers as the partners. This allows the partners to initiate
some proactive solutions. Otherwise, the initiative can only
include the third-party auditor and suppliers, aiming at
jointly rectifying unsustainable issues after their realization.
Environmental Science and Pollution Research (2023) 30:76491–76514
The partners are also suggested to initiate collaboration
when they face highly uncertain business environments and
highly frequent transactions between themselves. In this
regard, we suggest them to allocate a significant capacity
of the supply chain communication infrastructure to some
voluntary conveners within the participants’ organizations.
The conveners should form a team to focus on establishing
and diffusing a common understanding of the new collective
objectives. The supply chain communication infrastructure
may not support the new allocation because the highly fre-
quent transactions occupy the major portion of its capacity.
We suggest two solutions to address this issue. First, the
partners can pool their financial and physical resources to
foster the extension of the capacity of their communication
infrastructure. Second, the partners can forgo some of their
autonomy and delegate some of their responsibilities to the
other ones. The solution can reduce the volume of transac-
tion required for their primary activities, leaving an extra
capacity for the mentioned conveners to enhance sustain-
able sourcing. This solution relies heavily on the partners’
trusting relationships, a necessary prerequisite for the col-
laborative approach.
Conclusions
The present study contributes to the literature on sustainable
sourcing by providing a comprehensive understanding of the
buyers’ partnerships for sustainable sourcing. The results
suggest that the buyers’ partnership approach can be selected
among cooperation, coordination, and collaboration. The
approaches are shown to be different in essence in terms of
ten interconnected facets. The results indicate that cooperation
is mainly characterized by only the sharing of information
between partners. On the other hand, partners in coordinative
partnerships retain most of their autonomy; so their roles and
responsibilities in their relationships are specified using for-
mal agreements. Finally, partners in collaborative partnerships
blur their organizational boundaries to align their diverging
objectives, pool their (physical) resources, and share their
(non-physical) knowledge.
The study moves beyond the existing literature on partner-
ships for sustainability by investigating the effectiveness of the
three partnership approaches. The results indicate that coop-
erative partnerships between stakeholders are not effective for
promoting sustainability as they lack the exchange of resources
between the participating organizations. In contrast, coordinative
and collaborative partnerships become effective for enhancing
sustainability because they are characterized by sharing or pool-
ing physical or non-physical resources.
The study also extends our understanding of the role
of complexity in the optimal selection of the partnership
approach for sustainable sourcing. We found that a complex
76511
sustainability issues requires a proactive sustainability solu-
tion. In this regard, establishing a collaborative partnership
is necessary to implement this solution as the roles and
responsibilities of each partner is not clear if an unsustain-
able event occurs. Hence, the partners become committed
to a strategic and proactive solution, i.e., some collective
efforts to avoid unsustainable events in advance. On the
other hand, we find that a coordinative partnership approach
is optimal for sustainability issues with less complexity. To
address this type of sustainability issue, we suggest opera-
tional and tactical sustainability solutions in which the roles
and responsibilities of each partner are clear to understand.
Although the structured review of the literature and the
adopted framework to were helpful uncover the buyers’
partnerships for sustainable sourcing, our work is not free
of limitations and can be extended in some ways. First, the
prevalence of the three partnership approaches was mainly
assessed using the content analysis in the academic litera-
ture. Future research should focus on gathering empiri-
cal data regarding the prevalence of these approaches in
the real-world partnerships for sustainable sourcing. Sec-
ond, the work does not address how a partnership evolves
through time and under what conditions a partnership for
sustainable sourcing is stable in the long run. Third, the
“autonomy of the participating organizations (APO)” facet
has been unexplored in the buyers’ coordinative partner-
ships for sustainable sourcing. The adopted framework
only suggests that the main portion of the APO facet
should be retained in coordinative partnerships. Accord-
ing to these limitations, future research can focus on the
following research questions, especially in the sustainable
sourcing context:
– What aspects of the partners’ autonomy are retained in
coordinative partnerships and why?
– How do partners in a collaborative partnership design
an internal conflict resolution procedure?
– How do the participants balance the formal and infor-
mal agreements in their collaborative partnerships?
– How do the synergetic effects in coordinative partner-
ships differ from those in collaborative partnerships?
– To benefit from their low transaction costs, can coop-
erative partnerships be modified so that they are effec-
tive for promoting sustainable sourcing? If so, how?
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplemen-
tary material available at https://d​ oi.o​ rg/1​ 0.1​ 007/s​ 11356-0​ 23-2​ 7541-w.
Acknowledgements The authors are grateful to the editors and review-
ers for their valuable comments and the opportunity to revise the arti-
cle. The authors also greatly thank Dr. Donna Sedgwick, the faculty
member of Department of Sociology at the Virginia Tech, for her useful
feedback and suggestions. The final version of the manuscript is the
sole responsibility of the authors, and not of anyone being thanked.
13
76512
Authors’ contributions Hamid Zarei: conceptualization, formal
analysis, investigation, methodology, validation, writing original draft,
writing, review, and editing; Morteza Rasti-Barzoki: supervision,
project administration, and visualization; Jörn Altmann: investiga-
tion, visualization, and validation; Bernhard Egger: investigation and
visualization.
Funding This research was supported by the National Research Foun-
dation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government, Ministry
of Science and ICT (MSIT), with No. NRF-2022R1A2C1092077, and,
also, by the NRF grant funded by the Korea government through MSIT
under the Brain Pool program with No. NRF-2021H1D3A2A01082266.
The Institute of Engineering Research (IOER) and the Institute of Com-
puter Technology (ICT) at Seoul National University provided research
facilities for this study.
Data availability All data generated or analyzed during this study are
included in this article.
Declarations
Ethics approval and consent to participate Not applicable.
Consent for publication Not applicable.
Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests.
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