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Alternative food networks (AFNs) have emerged to improve both environmental and socio-economic aspects of food provisioning, including the living and working conditions of farmers. Their objectives are supposed to be mediated through the shortening of chains and/or the implication of alternative value chain actors (VCAs). Through the application of a social life cycle assessment methodological proposal on two products from three Belgian AFNs, we first verify how the AFNs meet sustainability promises. Second, we investigate how such social sustainability of the assessed products is influenced by the differentiated configurations of chain governance in the AFNs. Such a discussion of root causes of social sustainability performances in product chains have been investigated very little as of yet. Our results show that AFN perform well in some aspects (consumer aspects, work satisfaction, social ties between VCAs), but in some others, AFN chains use similar mechanisms as the ones used by mainstream chains (unbalanced market power, unfair prices, and low commitment between VCAs), with potentially detrimental effects on profitability and employment conditions for VCAs located upstream, i.e., farms. Our framework is useful to highlight social hotspots in product chains, and to discuss these across the differences in the configurations of the chain layout and&mdash, in the end&mdash, chain governance.

This article introduces a process that can be used by companies to obtain an increasingly precise picture of their supply chain social footprint (negative impacts) and identify potential social handprints (i.e., changes to business as usual that create positive impacts) using social organizational life cycle assessment (SO-LCA). The process was developed to apply to the electronics sector but can be used by companies in any industry. Our case study presents the social footprint of a typical US computer manufacturing company and identifies potential salient social risks and hotspots using generic information about the inputs that are related to a global trade model. The global trade model enables us to map the likely supply chain based on where inputs are usually sourced from by the US electronic computer manufacturing sector. In order to identify material impacts, normalization factors were created and used. Once the material impacts and salient risks are known, it becomes necessary to identify root causes in order to plan actions that will truly make a meaningful change, addressing the issues at stake. The article concludes by establishing a methodology that enables the use of the industry-level impacts and assessment in combination with the organization&rsquo, s own data to calculate company-specific results.