We are pleased to share a perspective paper emerging from the VALPOP project which addresses a recurring challenge in research and practice: Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) progress is often explained through either top-down policy and regulation or bottom-up local innovation and civil society action, as if these pathways operate independently. The authors argue that this separation obscures how change actually happens across countries, sectors, and global value chains.

The paper’s central contribution is to propose a co-evolutionary perspective on institutional change. Instead of treating institutions as a stable “context” that firms merely respond to, it conceptualises SDG-relevant change as a recursive, multi-level system in which policies, organisational strategies, stakeholder pressures, and local experimentation continually influence one another. In practical terms, this means the drivers of change can generate feedback loops, sometimes reinforcing progress, sometimes stalling it, depending on how different actors and governance layers interact over time.

A particularly useful element of the paper is its clarification of the multiple roles that multinational enterprises (MNEs) can play in these processes. Rather than casting firms as either passive compliers or heroic innovators, the paper highlights that MNEs can move between roles across contexts and time: complying with regulation in one setting, catalysing bottom-up initiatives in another, and sometimes acting as coalition partners or brokers where institutional capacity is weak. This “multiplex” view is important because it directs attention to mechanisms, how partnerships form, how legitimacy is built, how standards diffuse, and how incentives change as governance evolves.