Stringent sustainability regulations are supported across developing democracies

Economic growth throughout global production networks places increased environmental and social burdens on populations in lower- and middle-income countries. Sustainability supply chain regulations aiming to mitigating these issues are highly salient across high-income democracies. However, the social benefits and increased production costs associated with sustainability governance are likely to materialize within the Global South. Local public acceptance of new global sustainability supply chain regulations is a necessary condition for successful implementation. Little is known about the acceptability of sustainability regulations for global supply chains in developing democracies. We study the acceptability and preference formation towards new sustainability regulations governance both within middle-income democracies and in comparison to high-income OECD states. Based on survey-embedded experiments conducted in the three largest democratic non-OECD economies (Brazil, India, Indonesia) and the 12 largest OECD importers (N=2,000 each), we find surprisingly high levels of acceptability for stringent supply chain regulations across all geographic regions. We explore between-country variation, finding higher levels of acceptability in Brazil and India than in Indonesia. Further, we find that sustainability regulations are perceived as having greater potential benefits than future cost, a finding consistent across all country contexts and policy stringency levels. Lastly, we find that acceptability is differently conditioned by individual attitudinal and ideological priors across Brazil, India and Indonesia. While these findings indicate opportunities for developing bi- or multilateral sustainability governance frameworks to improve the provision of environmental and social public goods within producing states, they also point to potential pitfalls depending upon localized patterns of politicization.