This global initiative focuses on how to increase the effectiveness of private sector collaboration with national governments in developing countries to help build the enabling conditions for the sustainable production of major agricultural commodity crops driving deforestation.

National and sub-national governments are a crucial part of the picture, but they have often been left out of private sector approaches to addressing deforestation and developing sustainable agricultural practice. But there can not be no long-term solution to the challenge of deforestation and the development of a sustainable agricultural sector in producer countries without effective land use governance. Moreover, deforestation cannot be solved through linear approaches. Instead, deforestation is a complex issue that has multiple root causes, no simple solutions and requires action on multiple fronts by multiple players.

Companies currently invest significant resources into supply chain management approaches, but relatively little into effective cross-sector collaboration with producer governments. This means that the most essential ingredient of any long-term solution is being comparatively neglected. Since it is also the hardest and most intractable part of the puzzle to solve, an injection of greater resources into addressing governance and the enabling conditions for sustainable production is urgently needed.

Value Beyond Value Chains is our response to address these issues. Through the promotion of comprehensive guidelines for the private sector, we aim at:

• Shifting mindsets, influencing the private sector to take more systemic approaches.
• Providing practical guidelines and concrete steps for companies on how to influence the enabling conditions for sustainable production.
• Catalyse more systemic public-private sector partnerships in key hotspot countries.

UNDP also uses Value Beyond Value Chains as an opportunity to reflect on and learn how to improve public-private collaboration, specially through multi-stakeholder collaboration spaces such as commodity platforms.

Read and download the VBV Private Sector Guidance Note as well as the Case study report and editable guidance toolkit.

For more information, please contact Charles O’Malley, FACS Systems Change Advisor at charles.omalley@undp.org