Cooperation, coordination, or collaboration? A structured review of buyers' partnerships to support sustainable sourcing in supply chains

The growing need of today's global supply chains for a paradigm shift to sustainability requires all supply chain members to establish 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.