I’m Mariana Gatti, speaking as Conserva: a consultancy shaped as a network of collaborators working across ecological, cultural and material systems. We support companies, institutions and community-led organisations in understanding the impacts and dependencies within their supply systems, and in designing resilience-focused strategies that respond to environmental, social and regulatory pressures.

Our work includes research, strategy, systems mapping and project implementation. Our practice is grounded in presence and the respect for local intelligence and agency.

I’m a researcher and strategist with deep knowledge of regenerative systems, including field practice, and extensive experience in fashion and textiles. I regularly speak at global forums including the UN, Textile Exchange and the Regenerative Agriculture Summit. My thoughts and writing appear in Business of Fashion, Vogue Business, Harper’s Bazaar, Forbes and The Sourcing Journal.

Explore our services in the next sections. Projects are delivered through teams assembled for the context integrating design, science, research, and technical, social and field practice.

Research is the foundation for good strategy. We work with companies, NGOs, producer organisations and cultural research teams to generate grounded insight that reflects the realities of land and culture.

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Offerings: • Supply-chain and material landscape studies • Qualitative field research and local insight generation • Stakeholder engagement: from farmers, community leaders and technical partners to the industry and NGOs • Ground truthing of sustainability claims and assumptions • Cultural and social movement research • Internal briefs and learning materials for teams

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This work reveals what is happening on the ground and what it means for strategy, investment and impact.

Previous research commissions include global tech platforms, major beverage groups, large consumer products and fashion brands. Our practice integrates scientific research methods that strengthen the rigor of how we approach socioenvironmental systems, qualitative insight and multi-stakeholder decision-making.

We help organisations design pathways that connect sustainability goals with the actual realities — current and future — of material sources. Sometimes the work calls for simple, place-based solutions (which often hide the most beautiful stories); sometimes it calls for innovation (guided by real needs rather than assumptions or trends). We help teams understand which approach serves the system best.

Designers and companies learn to invest in the enabling conditions — capacity, resources, reciprocity and ecological coherence — that increase a system’s regenerative potential and allow partners to thrive.

The work can be as simple as advising on product and material strategies and sourcing, considering desire, durability, quality and impact (and through a systems perspective.)

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Offerings: • Regenerative materials sourcing and production pathways • Program design for nature-based systems • Community partnership structures • Governance models and decision flows • Risk and feasibility analysis grounded in local reality • Indicators and monitoring approaches suited to ecological and social contexts • Advisory for leadership teams and working groups

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This is where insight joins science and technical depth, becoming direction. And direction becomes a plan.

Field Implementation & Local Coordination: for organisations that are ready to move beyond planning, we support the design and daily running of on-the-ground programs.

Our experience includes complex, multistakeholder projects commissioned by brands such as Veja and Lojas Renner S.A., and financed by sustainable development funds including KWF/DEG and UK Pact.

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Offerings: • Technical assistance and capacity-building program design and execution • Field presence planning and facilitation • Stakeholder alignment and communication — coordination with producer organisations, cooperatives, community groups and industrial partners • Participatory processes for shared decision-making • Definition of science-based KPI, metrics and measurement frameworks with the input of producers and in alignment with global standards. + Data collection, analysis and reporting • Local insight loops for adaptive learning • Documentation of practices, challenges and progress

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This work keeps strategy connected to real life and helps teams respond to what is actually unfolding.

We are grounded in ethics of presence, equity and local intelligence. We also know that research and strategy should be robust enough to inform global frameworks, standards and science-based targets. This balance matters: programs rooted in real conditions are the ones that endure and remain credible under scrutiny.

Our approach:

Presence

Projects succeed when teams spend time in the places where materials originate. Presence builds trust and reveals what metrics cannot capture. It grounds strategies so they are accountable to lived realities.

Grounded Intelligence

Systems understanding comes from people, land, seasons and memory. Integrating experiential insight with scientific and economic considerations leads to solutions that are honest, actionable, and lasting.

Shared Agency

Communities hold knowledge that cannot be replaced. We believe in shared decision-making, ensuring that action reflects the realities of producers. This leads to partnerships that strengthen over time, and strategies that hold up under regulatory, environmental and social pressures.

Write us at e-mail: [email protected].

Photo by Tinko Czetwertynski

Cont. - OECD Forum on Due Diligence in the Garment and Footwear Sector' takeaways.

1. Informality and the persistent invisibility of tier 4

The panel ‘The Missing Millions: Due Diligence in Informal Settings’ discussed the risks of the exclusion of informality in face of corporate diligence. Brands are encouraged to move beyond Tier 1, but informal workers are generally pushed out of production due to regulatory frameworks (such as EPR) and governance’s inability to integrate them. Francesca Mangano from TFG Brands London shared inspiring, notably personal and emotional experiences from her work in India toward that inclusivity and legibility.

Tier 4 (largely raw materials) was almost invisible during the forum. Even upstream-focused sessions were centered on industry actors. This reflects the structure of supply chain governance: regulation concentrates where contracts can be signed. Agricultural systems, especially smallholders, are opaque to compliance. I think that without deliberate efforts to include fibre-producing regions, due diligence strengthens as asymmetries grow.

An exception was the side session 'Developing Resilience in the Textile Supply Chain Against Climate Change-Induced Disasters', hosted by WWF, which included producer perspectives (including Mariela Calderon from Bergman/Rivera). Lived realities of producers, adaptation threats and possibilities were talked about in raw terms. Takeaway: upstream inclusion is possible when intentionally structured.

2. Supply chain reconfiguration/redistribution of risk

Volatility continues to be absorbed unevenly across tiers. Agility is frequently promoted as response. The capacity to manage disruption is still structurally asymmetric, despite overall agreement on who bears the most power and responsibility.

Everyone agrees that disruption is structural, not episodic. In 'Navigating Supply Chain Shocks: Balancing Agility with Due Diligence', industry representatives mentioned forecasting capacity is going downhill (from COVID to climate and geopolitics.) Sapphire's GM (large Pakistan manufacturer) noted that they now struggle to forecast ONE season ahead.

The Cambodia Minister of Labour and Vocational Training argued that brands should share commercial risk and commit to purchasing volumes even during downturns.

VF’s VP, Global Sustainability & Responsibility said that labour costs are no longer negotiated with suppliers. This invites reflection on how price adjustments are reallocated. Which costs components or margins are taking the hit?

3. The growing weight of audit regimes

Probably the least surprising takeaway is that manufacturers are concerned about audit fatigue and regulatory divergence. Even in upstream-oriented discussions, attention gravitated around compliance efficiency (with no systemic redesign in sight.) The multiplication of certifications and standards is becoming an impossible financial and administrative burden.

One large manufacturer mentioned to have 45 parallel certifications in place, around €120,000 in annual costs (translate to any Global South currency) and 220 days spent on audits in 2025. Calls for consolidation into a single standard were raised, as they have been at every apparel conference.

This monitoring density doesn't address power imbalances, and those taking the smallest slices of the pie still carry the responsibility. The forum’s emphasis on streamlining certifications suggests the issue is acknowledged, but solutions are still largely technocratic.

4. Data and legibility; participatory digital design

In a really good session about data and digital systems: 'Freedom of association in focus: meaningful data for effective human rights due diligence', concerns emerged on how grievance mechanisms are designed (far from factories) and experienced (by factory workers).

The overall agreement: grievance issues and worker feedback ask for human reciprocity and trust; and data system designers should co-design with (which takes spending time and assimilating realities of) users.

Great contributions from Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Labour Union. Among them, an anecdote of a digital tool implemented that relied on simplified interfaces (such as emotive emojis) described as infantilising and patronising.

The Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions raised a concern about declining supplier disclosure and mistrust around data governance, including uncertainty about where worker data is stored and how it’s used.

Researcher Jake Stein highlighted participatory design approaches in which platform workers deconstructed and reimagined Uber’s driver-facing data schema. He also asked a critical question: who bears responsibility if a digital tool causes harm?

This brought me back to Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) and the concept of legibility, where governance systems prioritise simplified representations of complex realities so that they are governable. Think the man-made evolution of the structures of bee hives.

(I'm currently obsessed with this read and doing research on a related topic — including about how technical interfaces can compress political and social claims into depoliticised metrics. Specifically on digital labour governance, van Doorn [2017] is a good one.)