Policy Instruments and their Impact on Business Practice in the Fashion Industry towards Sustainability : Learning Outcomes from the Food Industry

Abstract: The fashion industry is not only known for its creativity and innovation, but also for its contribution to environmental pollution, climate change as well as for social imbalances and poverty. Ecological and societal standards have so far only played a minor role in this industry for production and distribution as well as for consumers for their consumption and disposal behaviour. However, in order to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals and prevent the maximum damage caused by pollution and exploitation, it is necessary to act more rapidly and consistently. Governmental control instruments can help to address those responsible, to regulate the market and to encourage improvements towards a more sustainable economy. The aim of this work is to develop a feasible governmental control instrument for the textile sector in order to provide possible solutions for some of the existing problems. Three different cases of already implemented policies in the food sector will be analysed and evaluated in order to detect the best-case policy with regard to sustainability as a basis for a derivation. The findings of the derived outcome will then be examined by experts in order to validate it. Finally, a recommendation summarises the findings of the literature review, the transfer of knowledge as well as the expert assessments. The result of this research paper is a control instrument derived from the food industry, which was evaluated with the help of expert interviews and has the potential to make the textile market more sustainable in the long term.