**3. Case Study and Methods**

The case study was conducted using the German Initiative on Sustainable Cocoa (GISCO), which was registered in April 2014 as an association based in Berlin [38]. In December 2019, a total of 75 organizations from the German cocoa and chocolate sector were involved in it. Each stakeholder is assigned to one of the four stakeholder groups: (Stakeholder Group A) the German Federal Government, which includes two federal ministries; (B) the Cocoa, Chocolate and Confectionery Industry, with 48 organizations; (C) the Retail Grocery Trade, with seven organizations; as well as (D) Civil Society, with 18 organizations (see Figure 1). GISCO has three main goals: "1. To improve living conditions of cocoa farmers and their families and to contribute to a secure living. 2. To conserve and protect natural resources and biodiversity in cocoa producing countries. 3. To increase cultivation and commercialization of sustainably produced cocoa" [39].

**Figure 1.** Organization Chart of GISCO. **Figure 1.** Organization Chart of GISCO.

To understand the power relationships in GISCO, member perspectives are included through the use of qualitative research. In preparation for the expert interviews with representatives of organizations from all four stakeholder groups, board members and secretariat staff, 84 min from MSI meetings between May 2014 and December 2019 were analyzed to capture network activity in terms of decision making. Minutes of the general meetings, board meetings and WG meetings were provided exclusively by GISCO for analysis. Three findings should be noted: First, the minutes indicate which actors were present at the meetings. Thus, over the five-and-a-half-year study period, it GISCO has an eight-member executive board composed of two representatives from each stakeholder group and a secretariat with a managing director (see Figure 1). Members can get involved by attending annual general meetings and participating in three working groups (WGs): WG 1: Communication, WG 2: PRO-PLANTEURS and WG 3: Sustainability. These are responsible for the public relations work of GISCO, the monitoring of the project "PRO-PLANTEURS", which aims to improve the socio-economic living and working conditions of 30,000 farmers in Côte d'Ivoire [40] and for developing further measures to increase the sustainability of cocoa on the German market.

(C) the Retail Grocery Trade, with seven organizations; as well as (D) Civil Society, with 18 organizations (see Figure 1). GISCO has three main goals: "1. To improve living conditions of cocoa farmers and their families and to contribute to a secure living. 2. To conserve and protect natural resources and biodiversity in cocoa producing countries. 3. To increase cultivation and commercialization of sustainably produced cocoa" [39].

GISCO has an eight-member executive board composed of two representatives from each stakeholder group and a secretariat with a managing director (see Figure 1). Members can get involved by attending annual general meetings and participating in three working groups (WGs): WG 1: Communication, WG 2: PRO-PLANTEURS and WG 3: Sustainability. These are responsible for the public relations work of GISCO, the monitoring of the project "PRO-PLANTEURS", which aims to improve the socio-economic living and working conditions of 30,000 farmers in Côte d'Ivoire [40] and for developing

further measures to increase the sustainability of cocoa on the German market.

was possible to count which organizations were particularly active. These were later requested for an interview through the GISCO secretariat. Second, the minutes indicate which actors in GISCO were given tasks. It was possible to count the delegations recorded in the minutes. This shows that it is mainly the secretariat that carries out a wide range of tasks. The executive board is the central committee in the MSI that delegates administrative tasks in particular to the secretariat and technical tasks primarily to the WGs in their function as think tanks. Third, the minutes show what was discussed in the meetings and what decisions were made. This made it possible to ask competent follow-up questions in the interviews and to better understand the answers. However, minutes lack the reasons, underlying arguments, compromises, or concessions through which the respective decisions were reached. This gap was closed with the help of guided expert interviews [41]. Building on the preparation through the analysis of the minutes, a guideline was drafted that included questions about GISCO's network governance [42] (pp. 55–70). Among other things, the interviewees were asked about their goals, strategies for implementation and exemplary negotiation processes in the network. The guideline was evaluated with a staff member from GISCO's secretariat and constantly evolved between To understand the power relationships in GISCO, member perspectives are included through the use of qualitative research. In preparation for the expert interviews with representatives of organizations from all four stakeholder groups, board members and secretariat staff, 84 min from MSI meetings between May 2014 and December 2019 were analyzed to capture network activity in terms of decision making. Minutes of the general meetings, board meetings and WG meetings were provided exclusively by GISCO for analysis. Three findings should be noted: First, the minutes indicate which actors were present at the meetings. Thus, over the five-and-a-half-year study period, it was possible to count which organizations were particularly active. These were later requested for an interview through the GISCO secretariat. Second, the minutes indicate which actors in GISCO were given tasks. It was possible to count the delegations recorded in the minutes. This shows that it is mainly the secretariat that carries out a wide range of tasks. The executive board is the central committee in the MSI that delegates administrative tasks in particular to the secretariat and technical tasks primarily to the WGs in their function as think tanks. Third, the minutes show what was discussed in the meetings and what decisions were made. This made it possible to ask competent follow-up questions in the interviews and to better understand the answers. However, minutes lack the reasons, underlying arguments, compromises, or concessions through which the respective decisions were reached. This gap was closed with the help of guided expert interviews [41].

Building on the preparation through the analysis of the minutes, a guideline was drafted that included questions about GISCO's network governance [42] (pp. 55–70). Among other things, the interviewees were asked about their goals, strategies for implementation and exemplary negotiation processes in the network. The guideline was evaluated with a staff member from GISCO's secretariat and constantly evolved between interviews. Fifteen individuals representing member organizations were interviewed from April to August 2020. The sample includes at least one person from each stakeholder group. In addition to the 15 interviews, three supplemental interviews were conducted. One with two staff members of the secretariat and two others during the preparation of the research project in 2018. There, one interview each was conducted with a representative of a member organization and with a representative of the secretariat. Thus, the evaluation is based on a total of 18 interviews. With one exception, all of the experts are or were involved in

the executive board or in working groups (WGs) and are therefore likely to have a strong knowledge of governance-relevant processes in GISCO (see Table 2).


**Table 2.** Comparison of the distribution of actors by stakeholder groups in GISCO and in the sample.

\* 75 organizations represent 100% of the membership (as of 2019). The two people in the secretariat are counted here as another stakeholder.

Due to COVID-19, the interviews were conducted by telephone or video calls in the summer of 2020. Although this only slightly limited the quality, it resulted in a challenging interview process, as described by Christmann [43]. The average duration of the interviews was 65 min, and all conversations were recorded with a voice recorder and transcribed into standard written German using simple transcription rules [44] (pp. 125–126). Each interviewee was assigned a unique identification code consisting of a letter and a number. The letters "A" to "D" stand for membership in one of the four stakeholder groups, and "G" represents the secretariat. The numbering is incremented continuously and has no meaning in terms of content. Subsequently, a "Thematic Qualitative Text Analysis" was conducted using the QDA software "MAXQDA" [44] (pp. 69–88). In a total of seven steps, main categories are first derived from theory, whose respective subcategories are inductively formed on the material (in this case, the transcripts). The final category system has a total of 2364 codings in 135 main categories and subcategories organized into five hierarchical levels [45]. The results regarding power relations derive from this analysis, although this is an excerpt.
