Bridging Environmental and Social Sustainability: Assessing Human Rights, Community Engagement, and Fair Labor Practices in Upstream Petroleum Supply Chains

• Abey Litty

  Texas University

  Author

The upstream petroleum supply chain faces intensifying scrutiny regarding its environmental footprint and social license to operate, yet comprehensive frameworks that systematically assess human rights, community engagement, and fair labor practices remain underdeveloped. This research investigates how institutional pressures shape sustainability outcomes across 144 oil and gas firms operating in a developing economy, analyzing the influence of coercive, normative, and mimetic pressures on supply chain management practices through the triple bottom line (TBL) lens. Employing a quantitative survey design with regression analysis, the study tests hypotheses concerning institutional pressure adoption patterns and their impact on social and environmental sustainability performance. The findings confirm that coercive and normative pressures significantly enhance sustainability and SCM practices, whereas mimetic pressures demonstrate no statistically significant effect (p > 0.05). Notably, firm size does not moderate these relationships, indicating that institutional pressures exert uniform influence regardless of organizational scale. These results contribute a validated framework for understanding the mechanisms driving sustainability adoption in petroleum supply chains, with practical implications for policymakers designing regulatory frameworks and practitioners implementing human rights due diligence protocols. The study establishes a replicable methodology for assessing the interplay between institutional forces and sustainability outcomes, achieving an explanatory power of 89.4% for the combined pressure-sustainability model.

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