Ownership structure, supplier relations and sustainability in agri-food chains: cooperatives, IOFs and family-owned firms.

As the global population continues to grow, meeting increasing food demands while fostering environmental, social, and economic sustainability becomes a progressively more complex challenge. To promote sustainability, firms must undertake strategic and operational adjustments. Central to these adjustments is a firm’s ownership structure, which determines capital structure, corporate governance, how firms define their objectives, and how they prioritize and allocate resources toward sustainability strategies. Besides internal firm decisions and behavior, implications of firm ownership structure extend to how firms interact with external partners. Buyer’s ownership structure can influence the relationships the firms adopt with their suppliers, including the level of collaboration, the reliance on formal mechanisms versus informal mechanisms, relational commitment, and the emphasis placed on sustainability-related expectations. This presents important implications for sustainability as in today’s globalized world businesses no longer compete solely as autonomous entities but rather as partners in supply chains. This thesis explores the interconnections between three key conceptual domains: buying firm ownership structure, buyer–supplier relationships, and sustainability outcomes by examining the following problem statement: How does the ownership structure of buying firms influence sustainability outcomes in agri-food supply chains, both at a firm level and at a supplier level?