The paper draws on recent advances in critical management studies conceptualizing Sustainable Development as a ‘contested field’ made of tensions and power relations between actors holding a variety of roles in Global Value Chains. On the basis of exploratory fieldwork involving the analysis of 15 discourses produced by representatives of mining corporations, civil society movements, and governments, we explore the ways in which SD is being defined and mobilized in the GVC for mineral resources in Africa. Beyond differences between the SD goals and positions adopted by these various actors, we observe a divide between the ‘global discourse’ adopted in all three categories of actors to convey a disembodied, broad and long term vision of SD issues, and a ‘local’ discourse giving concrete, specific substance to SD issues by accounting for the particular types of social, environmental or economic problems encountered at the mining sites. We build on Spicer’s notion of ‘spatial scale’ to highlight the theoretical implications of such results in terms of understanding the dynamics of social and political forces at play in the SD arena of global value chains.
