United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and The Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) are soliciting pilot participants in a new project to develop and test a capability framework for sustainable value chains.

The "capability" approach shifts the focus from driving performance on certain sustainability metrics to building the capacity of organizations in a supply chain to identify and meet priorities tailored to their business strategy and local resources. This customized decision-making process is expected to better balance the tension between the economic logic of global value chains and the localized logic of sustainability. The capability framework is designed to:

• incrementally build skills,
• gradually broaden the boundaries of concern from local facilities to the value chain, and
• eventually broaden the boundaries to include civil society.

Each of these stages has a set of key activities appropriate to that stage of development and that lay the foundation for moving to higher levels of performance. Improvement efforts are targeted, facilitating successful projects and faster learning.

For more information about the framework or about participating in the pilot, contact Sonia Valdivia (Sonia.Valdivia@unep.org) or Tom Swarr (t.swarr@fivewinds.com), or visit http://UNEP_CMM.airset.com/.

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