Chikako Oka

Niklas Egels-Zandén

Rachel Alexander

Buyer Engagement and Labour Conditions in Global Supply Chains: The Bangladesh Accord and Beyond

The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh ('the Accord') has received both praise and criticism concerning its implications for corporate responsibility and power. This article contributes to the debate by situating the Accord within a broader set of activities that buyers are engaged in to promote better labour conditions in their supply chains. The authors identify three approaches of buyer engagement: auditing, capacity building and advocacy.

Drawing on interviews conducted with European brands and retailers, the article shows how buyers perceive the merits and challenges of these approaches, and whether and how they discharge responsibility and power through these activities. The study shows that the Accord is seen primarily as part of the auditing approach with a key feature being its use of collective leverage as a means of enforcement. While greater buyer power has not necessarily been accompanied by greater responsibility, the article highlights heterogeneity among buyers in how they take up different approaches, painting a more nuanced picture of buyer responsibility and power.

INTRODUCTION

The Bangladesh Accord on Building and Fire Safety (hereafter, the Accord) that emerged in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013 has been hailed by some as a breakthrough and a game-changer, given its embedded legal liability [START_REF] Anner | Toward Joint Liability in Global Supply Chains: Addressing the Root Causes of Labor Violations in International Subcontracting Networks[END_REF] and labourinclusive nature [START_REF] Donaghey | When Industrial Democracy Meets Corporate Social Responsibility: A Comparison of the Bangladesh Accord and Alliance as Responses to the Rana Plaza Disaster[END_REF]. Others question whether it really is a paradigm shift, given that it reproduces corporate power [START_REF] Scheper | Labour Networks under Supply Chain Capitalism: The Politics of the Bangladesh Accord[END_REF] and serves as a white-washing tool for corporations [START_REF] Salminen | The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh: A New Paradigm for Limiting Buyers' Liability in Global Supply Chains?[END_REF]. The Accord thus reflects the ongoing broader debate on corporate responsibility and power in global supply chains.

In this debate, we hear little of what buyers think about the Accord and how they situate it in relation to their engagement with other activities aimed at better labour conditions in their supply chains. The Accord, however exceptional and novel its origin, governance and legal implications may be, is just one of many corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities for global firms. Indeed, the Accord is rather limited in terms of issue scope (i.e. building and fire safety) and geography (Bangladesh), while global buyers are pressed to engage in a wider range of sustainability issues in their global supply chains. In this article, therefore, we seek to understand the Accord and its significance (or lack thereof) by situating it among a broader set of buyer activities aimed at improving labour conditions in their supply chains.

To complement the other two articles in this special section, which cover workers' and factory managers' perspectives, we delve into buyers' perspectives by drawing on 130 interviews with CSR managers, procurement managers and corporate strategy managers representing 64 garment firms headquartered in Germany, Sweden and the UK. We ask how the Accord fits into the overall tool kit of buyer engagement, and how buyers perceive the benefits and challenges of these activities. In light of the ongoing debate on buyer responsibility and power concerning the Accord, we will also examine how buyers discharge responsibility and power as they engage in different types of activities. In so doing, we aim to contribute to a better and more nuanced understanding of buyers' motivations and constraints, and the implications of these on corporate responsibility and power more broadly.

The rest of the article proceeds as follows. We open with a literature review which situates the Accord in the scholarly debate on buyer responsibility and power and discusses the three approaches employed by buyers: auditing, capacity building and advocacy. We then provide an overview of the garment retail landscape in Germany, Sweden and the UK, and discuss the data and methods of our study. The empirical section locates the Accord in relation to the three approaches and shows how buyers perceive the relative merits and demerits of each approach, as well as addressing how buyer power and responsibility manifest themselves. This is followed by a discussion which draws out key findings related to the three approaches, and a conclusion which highlights contributions and policy implications, notably the need to level the playing field so that all buyers will be compelled to assume greater responsibility.

BUYER RESPONSIBILITY, POWER AND THE ACCORD

Global firms sourcing from developing countries are often seen as accountable for ensuring fair working conditions in their supplier facilities. This expectation is based on two key assumptions. One is that buyers are, at least partly, responsible for suppliers' working conditions. The second is that these buyers have the power to regulate labour conditions in their supply chains.

Buyer responsibility for supply chain practices has evolved from denial and rejection in the 1980s, through reluctant acknowledgment and development of corporate codes of conduct (CoCs) and auditing in the1990s, to a more proactive engagement by buyers in the past decade [START_REF] Schrempf-Stirling | Upstream Corporate Social Responsibility: The Evolution from Contract Responsibility to Full Producer Responsibility[END_REF]. Against the background of activist campaigns and pressure, firms sourcing from poorly regulated environments have been compelled to close a regulatory gap [START_REF] Gereffi | Lecture 3. Globalization and the Demand for Governance[END_REF]. This process can be seen to be shifting responsibility from public institutions to private corporations.

Call for greater buyer responsibility is often based on the assumption that buyers wield overwhelming power vis-à-vis suppliers and producing-country governments. Development and geography scholars tend to highlight uneven power relations and asymmetries between powerful and concentrated lead firms in the North and suppliers scattered in the global South [START_REF] Coe | Global Production Networks: Realizing the Potential[END_REF][START_REF] Nadvi | Global Standards, Global Governance and the Organization of Global Value Chains[END_REF][START_REF] Tokatli | Networks, Firms and Upgrading within the Blue Jeans Industry: Evidence from Turkey[END_REF]. Such power asymmetries and conflicting demands placed on suppliers underlie the anxieties and frustrations expressed by suppliers in the South (Rahman and Rahman, this issue; see also Ruwanpura and Wringley, 2011).

However, others argue that buyers are less powerful than commonly assumed and have limited leverage vis-à-vis suppliers. First, buyers do not necessarily hold the balance of power in individual buyer-vendor relationships (Alexander, 2019a). For example, many Tier 1 suppliers are no longer captive, dependent or subservient as they are now themselves large multinationals with multiple subsidiaries and capable of offering a full package of services [START_REF] Azmeh | Asian Firms and the Restructuring of Global Value Chains[END_REF][START_REF] Merk | The Rise of Tier 1 Firms in the Global Garment Industry: Challenges for Labour Rights Advocates[END_REF]. Second, factory managers facing contradictory and unrealistic buyer demands can engage in evasion, actively circumventing and disrupting institutional pressure through various means (Alexander, 2019a;[START_REF] Soundararajan | Small Business and Social Irresponsibility in Developing Countries: Working Conditions and "Evasion" Institutional Work[END_REF].

Third, intermediaries such as sourcing agents can dilute and limit buyer power [START_REF] Oka | Channels of Buyer Influence and Labor Standard Compliance: The Case of the Cambodian Garment Industry[END_REF][START_REF] Soundararajan | Voluntary Governance Mechanisms in Global Supply Chains: Beyond CSR to a Stakeholder Utility Perspective[END_REF].

The question of buyer responsibility and power is at the heart of the debate surrounding the Accord. The Accord is seen by some as a game changer given its labour-inclusive governance, embodying industrial democracy [START_REF] Donaghey | When Industrial Democracy Meets Corporate Social Responsibility: A Comparison of the Bangladesh Accord and Alliance as Responses to the Rana Plaza Disaster[END_REF] and transnational industrial relations arrangement (Ashwin et al., forthcoming). Moreover, the Accord's legally binding nature has been heralded a breakthrough, paving the way for joint liability in global supply chains [START_REF] Anner | Toward Joint Liability in Global Supply Chains: Addressing the Root Causes of Labor Violations in International Subcontracting Networks[END_REF]. On the other hand, the Accord is criticized for not changing power relations and for becoming a self-serving tool for corporations. Here, the Accord is not seen as a paradigm shift because it reproduces transnational corporate buying power [START_REF] Scheper | Labour Networks under Supply Chain Capitalism: The Politics of the Bangladesh Accord[END_REF] and it lacks shared responsibility on the part of buyers [START_REF] Barrett | Five Years after Rana Plaza: The Way Forward[END_REF]. Moreover, some legal scholars argue that buyers can control liabilities arising from the legal binding nature of the Accord while taking advantage of white-washing effects vis-à-vis consumers and regulators [START_REF] Salminen | The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh: A New Paradigm for Limiting Buyers' Liability in Global Supply Chains?[END_REF].

In this debate, buyers' perspectives have been largely lacking; where they are mentioned, they are often portrayed as irresponsible and greedy capitalists who only care about their own interests. However, we are starting to see work emerging that examines buying firms' perspectives and how they have reacted to the Rana Plaza disaster, how they have engaged in the Accord and what has come out of the process. For example, scholars have shown that the Rana Plaza as a focusing event had greater effects on followers and laggards rather than on leading garment firms [START_REF] Schüßler | Governance of Labor Standards in Australian and German Garment Supply Chains: The Impact of Rana Plaza[END_REF], impacting on how buyers have constructed varying CSR identities (progressives vs. conservatives) as they engaged in the Accord process [START_REF] Huber | Progressive and Conservative Firms in Multistakeholder Initiatives: Tracing the Construction of Political CSR Identities within the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh[END_REF], and have shown how a group of progressive firms created trust among themselves and with unions through the Accord that spilled over to another collective and union-inclusive initiative, ACT (Ashwin et al., forthcoming). 1 What still remains unexplored in the literature are buyers' perspectives in terms of how they view the Accord vis-à-vis other activities they engage in, the relative merits and demerits, as well as how buyers discharge their responsibility and power through a range of activities (one being the Accord) in the post Rana Plaza era. It is important, therefore, to situate the Accord in relation to other activities that buyers are engaged in to improve labour conditions in their supply chains.

THREE APPROACHES OF BUYER ENGAGEMENT

Drawing on the literature, we identify three main approaches that buyers use to promote positive changes in supply chain labour conditions: auditing, capacity building and advocacy.

Auditing has been at the centre of the corporate response to growing pressures for buyers to address poor working conditions in their supply chains [START_REF] Bartley | Certifying Forests and Factories: States, Social Movements, and the Rise of Private Regulation in the Apparel and Forest Products Fields[END_REF][START_REF] O'rourke | Outsourcing Regulation: Analyzing Nongovernmental Systems of Labor Standards and Monitoring[END_REF]. The system generally involves buying firms setting CoCs, having suppliers audited by internal or external auditors, and demanding remediation when violations are found. The auditing approach has been adopted by almost all major multinationals, making social auditing a US$ 80 billion industry (AFL-CIO, 2014). The auditing approach thus comprises three aspectsstandards, audits and enforcementeach of which can pose different challenges.

Unilateral standards set by corporations have been criticized as weak and unaccountable [START_REF] Jenkins | Corporate Responsibility and Labour Rights: Codes of Conduct in the Global Economy[END_REF]. Although this issue is increasingly being addressed as CoCs converge toward industry standards or the base codes of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs), such as Amfori Business Social Compliance Initiative (BSCI) or Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) base codes, fragmentation continues in the garment industry's private auditing systems [START_REF] Turcotte | Explaining Variation in the Multiplicity of Private Social and Environmental Regulation: A Multi-case Integration across the Coffee, Forestry and Textile Sectors[END_REF]. Audits, meanwhile, are often found to be unreliable because of the quality of auditors [START_REF] Lebaron | Benchmarking Global Supply Chains: The Power of the "Ethical Audit" Regime[END_REF], because not all issues are amenable to auditing [START_REF] Barrientos | Economic and Social Upgrading in Global Production Networks: A Paradigm for a Changing World[END_REF], and because suppliers can engage in all sorts of dubious practices to hide non-compliance [START_REF] Raworth | Mimicking "Lean" in Global Value Chains: It's the Workers Who Get Leaned On[END_REF]. Lastly, enforcement of remediation is not 1 For more on the ACT initiative, see the website: https://actonlivingwages.com/ straightforward. [START_REF] Locke | Virtue out of Necessity? Compliance, Commitment, and the Improvement of Labor Conditions in Global Supply Chains[END_REF] call it 'an open secret' that brands rarely stop working with factories due to compliance issues and they may not have enough leverage to enforce needed changes. These challenges explain the generally disappointing impact of CoCs and auditing on labour rights and working conditions in global supply chains [START_REF] Egels-Zandén | Do Codes of Conduct Improve Worker Rights in Supply Chains? A Study of Fair Wear Foundation[END_REF][START_REF] Locke | The Promise and Limits of Private Power: Promoting Labor Standards in a Global Economy[END_REF].

Given the limits to the auditing approach, a different system which emphasizes commitment and cooperation has been proposed as a promising alternative. [START_REF] Locke | Virtue out of Necessity? Compliance, Commitment, and the Improvement of Labor Conditions in Global Supply Chains[END_REF] argue that a commitment-based model characterized by information sharing, trust building and problem solving between auditors, suppliers and buyers can address deep-seated problems that the traditional compliance model could not. Lund-Thomsen and Lindgreen (2014) identify a shift (at least in discourse) from a compliance paradigm based on policing to a cooperative paradigm with seemingly higher levels of shared responsibility for addressing labour challenges. One of the core features of the cooperative paradigm is capacity-building support from buyers for their suppliers (ibid.). Capacity building can take various forms, from training suppliers in sustainability standards [START_REF] Riisgaard | Multistakeholder Initiatives in Global Production Networks: Naturalizing Specific Understandings of Sustainability through the Better Cotton Initiative[END_REF], to empowering workers, for instance through the HerProject initiated by Business for Social Responsibility, 2 and introducing lean production techniques in supplier facilities [START_REF] Distelhorst | Does Lean Improve Labor Standards? Management and Social Performance in the Nike Supply Chain[END_REF]. Buyers can use capacity-building approaches to address diverse and sometimes more complex challenges that producers face (Alexander, 2019b). Nonetheless, trade-offs and tensions between auditing and capacity building have been documented at the level of implementation [START_REF] Riisgaard | Multistakeholder Initiatives in Global Production Networks: Naturalizing Specific Understandings of Sustainability through the Better Cotton Initiative[END_REF].

The third approach, advocacy, has received scant attention in the literature on global supply chains. While there is emerging research on 'responsible lobbying' seeking to promote social good through public policy means [START_REF] Anastasiadis | Lobbying and the Responsible Firm: Agenda-setting for a Freshly Conceptualized Field[END_REF], such phenomena in developing country contexts have been neglected. Although brands are often portrayed as culprits, some of them are playing the role of labour rights advocates. [START_REF] Oka | Brands as Labour Rights Advocates? Potential and Limits of Brand Advocacy in Global Supply Chains[END_REF] work on brand advocacy draws attention to such political activities carried out by buyers, who pressure producercountry governments to take pro-worker actions. Drawing on social movement theory, Oka shows how issue salience, mobilization structures, political opportunities and context, and resource dependence of actors shape the likelihood and success of brands' collective political 2 For more information, see: https://herproject.org/ action. In this nascent field, there is still much that is unknown. Who is involved in these activities? What are the merits and demerits of advocacy as perceived by brands? In this article, we expand the scope of brand advocacy to include advocacy vis-à-vis buying-country governments as well as producing-country governments.

These three approaches can be combined and used simultaneously, and some initiatives can involve all three types of activities. For instance, Amfori BSCI, a business-driven initiative, has all three elements as it coordinates auditing, proposes capacity building, and engages in advocacy vis-à-vis political actors. In our empirical findings, we examine buyers' perceptions of each type of engagement.

CONTEXT, DATA AND METHOD

This article focuses on understanding the ways that European buyers perceive their roles in governing labour conditions in their supply chains. To learn about buyers' perspectives, we conducted semi-structured interviews with CSR managers, procurement managers and corporate strategy managers. Overall, the article draws on interviews with representatives of 64 European firms. All of the firms had an annual revenue of over 30 million euros in 2015/16, and were among the largest domestically owned apparel brands and retailers in their respective countries in terms of revenue. The interviews were conducted between 2015 and 2019, and include 54 interviews with 22 German firms that rank, based on revenue, in the domestically owned top 70; 33 interviews with 21 Swedish firms that rank in the domestically owned top 30; and 43 interviews with 21 British firms that rank in the domestically owned top 100. Between one and five interviews were conducted per firm.

Additionally, the authors attended over 30 industry events during this period, where related topics were discussed.

The home countries of the firms interviewed for this study all have large apparel retail markets; in 2018, these were worth US$ 66 billion in Germany, US$ 9 billion in Sweden, and US$ 60 billion in the UK. Within these countries, there is a high level of concentration of sales within a small group of companies: the retail market share of the top 20 companies in 2018 was 34 per cent in Germany, 47 per cent in Sweden, and 36 per cent in the UK. 3 A list of the top 20 garment retailers in each country is provided in Appendix Table A.1. In all three countries, most retail has traditionally taken place through clothing specialists (see Figure 1). However, the popularity of clothing specialists is decreasing with the growth of supermarkets in the apparel sector, especially in the UK (Marketline 2018c), and of online retail, which has already captured a significant share of the clothing market in Germany (Marketline, 2018a).

[Figure 1 about here] Considering the largest domestic firms in each country, there are significant differences among the three countries studied. The UK and Germany are home to many large companies, with both having 20 or more domestically owned garment sellers with over US$ 1 billion turnover in 2015/164 . With the exception of H&M, most Swedish brands are smaller than those in the UK and Germany. Firms based in each of these countries often interact with other domestic firms in various national forums (e.g. ETI in the UK, the Swedish BSCI national chapter, BSCI in Germany). National histories of industrial relations prior to the trend of outsourcing have been found to play a role in shaping contemporary labour governance institutions and norms in these countries [START_REF] Alexander | Understanding the Emergence of Supply Chain Governance Institutions in Liberal Market Economies and Coordinated Market Economies[END_REF]. Large brands and retailers in each of the countries have similar models which involve designing and marketing domestically, and largely relying on independent suppliers to carry out production.

Table 1 shows the top five sources of garment imports for each country in 2018. As can be seen, Bangladesh is an important sourcing location for each European country in this article.

[Table 1 about here] Interview transcripts were coded using Nvivo qualitative analysis software to identify portions of text in which respondents discussed benefits, challenges, power, responsibility and the three categories of activitiesauditing, capacity building and advocacy. The authors systematically reviewed these passages to identify key perceptions emerging from the interviewees' responses in order to better understand buyers' perspectives.

EMPIRICAL FINDINGS

Auditing

The vast majority of firms in our sample have either internal or external staff auditing their suppliers' labour conditions. Despite its widespread use, CSR managers are well aware of the limitations of social auditing in bringing substantial progress to the lives of workers:

If you look at auditing, 60 billion a year is spent on auditing, it means nothing, right, because if you look at what we've achieved, you know, workers' wages have gone down by like 30 per cent in the last five years. Ours have gone up by 25 per cent. So we've not made lives better through auditing because again, it is just that snapshot … it's just a piece of paper they can hide behind. 5 While few companies are considering a shift away from auditing to capacity-building, no firm in our sample was willing to abandon auditing. This approach remains a cornerstone for many companies, as it gives them a sense of control. As one brand representative put it: 'I cannot see that we would ever stop with auditing. You have to have some form of control function'. 6 Another CSR manager says that auditing gives some sort of guidelines, despite its limitations:

So whilst there's, these days, quite a lot of negativity around auditing, it still does have its purpose. We never take it as gospel, per se. It's a snapshot in time. It's as good as the person who conducted that audit on that particular day and the people who were present in the factory, cooperation, non-cooperation, accessibility to records and documents and so forth but it does give us an indication and a good guideline. 7 One of the challenges of the auditing approach (apart from standards and audits themselves) is how to create incentives for suppliers to remediate. Although the need is very much felt, very few brands claim to have integrated compliance performance in sourcing decisions, as illustrated by one procurement manager: While carrots are rarely provided, even sticks are not very effective in many cases. Most of the brands and retailers we interviewed say they have different degrees of leverage vis-à-vis supplier manufacturers, depending on the nature of their relationship (e.g. length, share of capacity). They sometimes lack clout to get their supplier factories to implement remediation, as one CSR manager explains: 'So the manufacturer partly failed to push it through because he did not necessarily depend on our orders and made it relatively clear that he was not willing to implement these standards. In general, this leads us to say goodbye to that manufacturer'.9

However, the threat to stop sourcing from the factory does not always give a sufficient incentive for suppliers to address violations, as another buyer comes in to replace them. This lack of leverage by individual buyers is especially salient in Bangladesh, where suppliers' production capacity is often very large, making it difficult for individual buyers to wield influence, as several buyers remarked. One option for smaller brands lacking leverage is to call on other larger brands to put things right, as one CSR manager explains: Who else is in that factory? Because if we're in there with H&M, if push comes to shove I can just call H&M and say 'hey, can you help us with this?' and H&M will then, you know, if I tell H&M this factory you know is not paying overtime, H&M will be outraged and they're bigger than we are in most cases, so they will go and make the factory pay overtime. 10In fact, the Accord has helped institutionalize such ad hoc inter-brand cooperation: for each factory, one brand (often the most important buyer in the factory) is nominated to take a lead in following up on remediation with the factory. While this can result in fruitful cooperation among brands, it can also encourage free-riding by smaller brands participating in the Accord.

While the Accord is essentially an auditing approach, its key features lie in setting common standards, sharing common auditing systems and, most importantly, collective enforcement.

While common standards and auditing systems have reduced auditing duplication and helped focus factories on remediation, the potential for collective response by over 200 buyers has enhanced buyer leverage. Several brand representatives mentioned that the Accord has helped expand their network and collaboration with other brands beyond their national network:

'What I think it has influenced greatly is what can be achieved collaboratively in the wake of … the Accord … working together. My network with ethical compliance people had always been limited to the ETI. I can tell you all my equivalents in all the big brands in the UK …. Now my closest allies would be in Germany, for instance '. 11 The situation is somewhat different in Sweden with the vast majority of firms stating that while the Accord did create space for inter-brand meetings, this has not translated into any indepth meaningful international collaboration. This is partly due to the fact that, with the exception of H&M, Swedish brands are fairly small and less global than their counterparts in Germany and the UK; they tend to let H&M take the lead in global discussions and initiatives while they restrict themselves to Swedish circles:

In the beginning there was a lot with the Accord. You got bombarded with emails.

There were meetings with other brands and factory managers to discuss how to solve issues …. Now it has settled down as we have elected representatives to discuss and negotiate with unions and other stakeholders. We now mainly have contact with the Swedish brands that we know from other initiatives as well. 12In general, however, the growth of inter-brand networks and collaboration has translated into a greater collective leverage vis-à-vis suppliers. One brand representative described the weight of a collective compliance approach as follows:

The thing with the Accord is obviously it kind of links in with the national action plan, and if somewhere was unsafe, then the combined weight of 200 buyers all saying we're not going to work with you, unless you do A, B, C, whatever, focuses a bit more attention by those suppliers who perhaps before might have been more tempted to go well, actually I don't mind about losing this customer, I've got all these other ones. 13 This is in line with the findings of Rahman and Rahman (this issue), showing how factory managers view and employ the concentrated power of buyers which has resulted from the Accord and another similar initiative, the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety. The question then is how buyers view their responsibility for remediation once auditing identifies certain deficiencies. Of the firms that we interviewed that source from Bangladesh, almost half said they assist suppliers in conducting rigorous reviews of safety standards, around a third said they assist suppliers in setting up or maintaining workplace safety committees, and about one in ten said they have purposefully paid higher prices to support factory improvements.

Very few of the buyers we interviewed shared the actual cost of remediation with their suppliers. Many buyers felt that it was not their responsibility to pay for factory improvements; some also stated that factory owners themselves say they do not want the buyers to 'own' their factory's machinery or equipment. A few buyers, especially from Swedish firms, said that they were paying a purchasing price that should allow factory management to cover such costs themselves, adding that 'We are really nice when it comes to prices. We do not pressure purchasing prices like maniacs like many other brands do and we have gained a reputation that we can be trusted'. 14 Moreover, a few brand representatives pointed out that Bangladeshi factory owners do have 'resource slack', as evidenced by their Porsche cars, Rolex watches and helicopters.

The non-corporate participants [of the Accord] are obsessed with making the companies pay for the remediation, even though, you know, the factory owners, well we made a list how we knew that our factories would be able to pay for their remediation project and one of the criteria we used was, does the owner own a helicopter. You know, so these poor third world people they may have to delay buying their fourth apartment in London in order to pay for the Accord. 15 Other brand representatives were more circumspect about the apparent riches of Bangladeshi factory owners, recognizing financial difficulties that many of them are facing. 13 CSR Manager, UK Firm 03, interview 6 December 2016. 14 CSR Manager, Swedish Firm 17, interview 10 December 2016. 15 CSR Manager, German Firm 07, interview 13 June 2016.

Capacity Building

While buyers tend to eschew shouldering the direct cost of remediation, they appear to be more willing to invest in capacity-building activities. One CSR manager said 'We tend not to just give money direct. It's always money for, you know … the training programme or resources support rather than actually just giving cash over to a factory'. 16 Indeed, capacity building is increasingly seen as a promising alternative or complement to traditional auditing.

Given that auditing and capacity building normally come from the same CSR budget, however, there is a trade-off between these activities. One of the consequences of the Accord to some (especially medium size) brands is that the CSR budget has been diverted to the Accord at the expense of other CSR work, including capacity building: 'We basically ended up dropping a lot of other CSR work in order to do the Accord work. And you know it's important to understand how fundamentally different from social compliance the Accord is.

You know only now they're trying to add on a training component to the Accord'. 17

While small or medium-sized firms found the Accord-related expenses rather high, for larger firms the Accord fees are more manageable. When asked whether they have reduced other CSR work because of the resources allocated for the Accord work, one brand responded 'No, no, definitely not, definitely not. Because [the Accord] membership fees are of manageable magnitude for a company of our size, to be totally honest'. 18 Despite the trade-offs, many CSR managers spoke of the need to engage in capacity building to address deeper issues and bring about change. One interviewee stated, 'Today you have to do development and education if you want to achieve any form of change. If not, you could audit every year but it will not lead to any form of change'. 19 Moreover, engaging in capacity-building projects allows them to 'tell nice stories' in their CSR reports, as one manager candidly admitted. 20 Capacity building takes two main forms. Some capacity building is designed as part of ongoing auditing approaches, such as supplier induction training when a new relationship 16 CSR Manager, UK Firm 04, interview 12 January 2017. 17 CSR Manager, German Firm 07, interview 13 June 2016. 18 begins with a factory. The Accord is an auditing programme that has an element of capacity building as training is provided to joint labour-management safety committees. However, other capacity-building programmes are designed as stand-alone initiatives that may be targeted at a particular issue and are often implemented through pilot projects. An example is HerProject, aiming at better worker health and empowerment, especially for women, coordinated by Business for Social Responsibility.

In terms of buyer-supplier relationships, capacity building involves a longer-term commitment with more frequent interactions than auditing requires. Many firms in this study claim to be shifting from short-term transactional relationships to longer-term relationships with fewer suppliers. Although partnership is emphasized, asymmetrical power and subtle coercion remain an important part of getting suppliers to join programmes specifically focused on capacity building. Buyers tend to urge their strategic suppliers to join these programmes based on the understanding that it is a necessary part of doing business, as one CSR manager explains: 'Right now we are trying to get our largest supplier in Bangladesh involved in HERproject. We are just getting started but they [the supplier management] understand that this is really important and see this as part of their business'. 21 Despite the growing interest and excitement about how capacity building can address rootcause issues (which auditing cannot), the reality is that not all brands are actively involved or willing to invest. And when they do, they often target their strategic suppliers in selected countries, limiting the reach and impact. A German CSR manager stated: '[most brands] don't want to go beyond auditing initiatives, because auditing is sufficient for their business model. Say you're a US brand and you're concerned about suppliers from a liability point of view, and you are relatively mid-range or smaller, you won't invest in any of these other types of capacity programmes'. 22 One of the interviewees from a UK firm commented: 'We've got many other programmes that are happening within factories beyond compliance that our teams are kind of … in and out of …, particularly our strategic suppliers, which is probably around 20 per cent'.

Advocacy

The third of the approaches, advocacy seeks to bring about change at the industry and/or national level, in producing and/or buying countries. Most firms in our sample have been engaged in some sort of advocacy activities, often by way of their membership in MSIs or business associations. One UK firm representative pointed out that businesses need to go beyond the compliance mode and engage with government actors to address systemic challenges:

We have to be able to call it out when it's a particular problem. For example … when we're talking about migration and things like that. Is that a government issue? Is it a business issue? Is it both? Where do people start to work together? The agenda is advancing so much and we can't just stick in this compliance, labour standard world. 24 In Bangladesh, as well as in other garment-producing countries, some leading brands have been engaged in advocacy, which may be ad hoc or more institutionalized. Ad hoc advocacy can take the form of boycotts, letter writing and face to face meetings with government officials. For instance, in February 2017 a group of brands threatened to boycott the Dhaka Apparel Summita flagship event organized by the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA)in response to the violent crackdown on striking workers in the garment factories of Ashulia in December 2016. C&A, Gap, H&M, Inditex, Next, Tchibo and VF Corporation announced their intention of not participating in the Summit, expressing their concern at the government's handling of the labour unrest [START_REF] Maccarthy | H&M, Zara Boycott Dhaka Apparel Summit over Worker Treatment Issues[END_REF]. This threat of boycott led to the immediate release of detained activists. Many of our interviewed brands have written or signed letters to governments expressing concerns or demanding changes to labour rights, laws or wages. Under pressure by activist campaigns, global brands have urged the Bangladeshi government to raise the minimum wage on several occasions, the latest of which was the round of wage talks in summer 2018 [START_REF] Russell | New Call for Brand Support ahead of Bangladesh Wage Talks[END_REF]. One Swedish brand which had signed letters to the Bangladeshi government asking for higher minimum wages in the past recounted: 'We have been part of a group writing letters to the government in Dhaka about raising the minimum wage and that we will 24 CSR Manager, UK Firm 14, interview 11 October 2017. continue to source from Bangladesh. Hopefully, this was one of the things that led to the recent wage increase'. 25 However, one CSR manager experienced in dealing with government officials questions the benefit and impact of signing letters, arguing that local A few buyers engage in ad hoc advocacy through meetings with government officials. For example, the CEO of H&M has met with key government figures in Bangladesh on several occasions and held public press conferences afterwards explaining the reasons for the meetings. 27 Nonetheless, such political activities are often reserved for very large buyers with important presence and clout in the producer country. One relatively large German retailer explains: 'But you don't have more influence than that. And I can't sit down with the prime minister of Bangladesh or someone else and say "You should XYZ". H&M might be able to do that. It is told that by now, they've got 800 people in the office in Dhaka'. 28While brands' responses to unfolding events are largely ad hoc, there is increasing institutionalization of brand advocacy. The Accord has an element of advocacy, as its implementation, maintenance and survival involve extensive lobbying on the part of brands vis-à-vis the Bangladeshi government and the BGMEA, according to one long-time member of the Accord steering committee.29 Brands' collective leverage was crucial in getting the powerful industry association to listen, as one manager recounts:

But it [collective leverage] also put massive pressure, thank God, on the industry association, the BGMEA, which are … I mean they're all factory owners; they're all involved in parliament as well. They're not exactly the nicest people in the world but it made them have to take notice and get involved and say, 'Okay, well we're going to have to take this seriously', because if they didn't, then brands would have had to pull back. They would have lost that sourcing. 30 Another example of institutionalized advocacy is the ACT initiative, which involves a coalition of global garment firms seeking to promote industry-wide collective bargaining agreements in key garment-producing countries (Ashwin et al., forthcoming). The basic idea of ACT is to get industry associations, unions and governments to negotiate a living wage that applies to the whole industry, on a country-by-country basis. Here, collective leverage becomes even more indispensable, highlighted by one ACT-member brand representative: Actually, we need everybody …. So some of the collaborations that we do will really, really work because actually, we have the power of huge retailers saying, 'You know what, Mr Government Official, you need to do the following'. And they go, 'Well, actually, we probably should if we want to keep this industry within our country'. So that can be really powerful. But one letter from one retailer to a government is not going to have any effect at all. So I do think collaboration is really important. 31 Even with such collective leverage of brands, however, advocacy vis-à-vis state actors and entrenched interests has its limits. The most telling example of this in Bangladesh is how the Court kept postponing the decision on whether to extend the Accord beyond 2018. While a compromise was eventually reached to replace the Accord with a new safety entity governed by the industry association, brands and trade unions, the whole process embodied the tug-ofwar between the Bangladeshi government and factory owners on one hand, and a coalition of brands on the other.

Meanwhile, there is a growing interest in lobbying buyers' home-country governments to strengthen regulation, which is another type of advocacy. A number of brand representatives mentioned the need to 'level the playing field' to make sure their competitors do not 'undercut' their efforts. Some brands are more proactive in lobbying for stronger legislation while others are more passive. One slightly up-market brand said they are in favour of regulation as it will make other brands more expensive. 32 Regulation may also help to convince internal sceptics within buying companies when CSR managers try to make their 30 CSR Manager, UK Firm 02, interview 21 September 2016. 31 CSR Manager, UK Firm 07, interview 20 February 2017. 32 CSR Manager, German Firm 05, interview 3 June 2016.

case. When asked whether the UK Modern Slavery Act was a good thing, one brand responded as follows:

I think it's a good thing if we're -I guess at [company name] we've always tried to do things to a certain level and some of the pushback that you sometimes get from other parts of the organization is when you have competitors who are not operating at the same level …. Government legislation lifts everybody up to a certain base level. It makes it a much more even playing field. The Modern Slavery Act, you could actually choose to do nothing with it as long as you made it clear that you weren't doing anything in your statement that you make. But the consumers are not going to be impressed with any business that is doing nothing to address slavery in their business or supply chain. So yeah, I think there's a role to play.

BUYER RESPONSIBILITY AND POWER ACROSS THE THREE APPROACHES

The main three approaches (auditing, capacity building and advocacy) and the different types we have identified within these approaches are summarized in Table 2. For example, auditing can be conducted by internal or external auditors, but a potentially more important distinction is whether the design of the auditing system is individual or collective. Three components of auditing are standards, audits and enforcement. Traditional social auditing has individual standards (CoCs), individually hired auditors (in-house or external), and enforcement by individual buyers. This is the most criticized form of social auditing. Brands themselves are well aware of the limitations, as illustrated above. Nonetheless, the practice continues because it gives buyers some assurance and guidelines at a manageable cost.

[Table 2 about here] Despite much hype and excitement surrounding the Accord, it is essentially an auditing approach, complemented by training. It can be distinguished from many other auditing approaches because its design incorporates common standards, common audit platforms and, more importantly, collective enforcement. While some third-party auditing systems have common standards and common audits (e.g. Amfori BSCI, Better Work), enforcement is usually on an individual basis, in the sense that violations can affect sourcing from a single buyer. Thus, what really sets the Accord apart from other auditing initiatives is collective enforcement in the form of the threat of withdrawal from over 200 participating buyers. However, auditing is just one of many activities that global buyers may be engaged in to promote better labour conditions in their supply chains. While few brands actually shoulder the cost of remediation, more are willing to invest in capacity-building programmes (in-house or external) covering a range of issues. While the main mandate of the Accord is auditing, it also carries out training for managers and workers. This can be considered as collective capacity building, where buyers pool resources and let one programme carry out training for their shared suppliers. Brands see capacity building as more promising than auditing in tackling a range of deeper issues such as worker empowerment. Moreover, talking about these initiatives in CSR reports makes them look good. Nonetheless, not all buyers invest in capacity-building initiatives and when they do, they tend to target their strategic suppliers only, limiting their reach and impact.

The least documented activity type is advocacy. We have identified ad hoc (e.g. letter writing, boycotts) as well as more institutionalized forms of advocacy (e.g. ACT), which can be individual but are increasingly shifting to collective. The advantage of advocacy is its potential to address industry-wide issues at a political level, which can lead to sweeping changes. Besides, showing that brands care by signing letters and talking to government officials is seen as a good PR gesture. Nonetheless, effective advocacy vis-à-vis powerful actors requires size, clout and local presence, which is not always possible. Moreover, there are limits to what buyers can do in the face of a recalcitrant government and entrenched interests, as the extreme difficulty of extending the Accord attests.

Examining the three approaches of buyer engagement shows that buyers are consolidating power by exploiting collective leverage vis-à-vis suppliers and political actors. The basis of power lies in brands' ability to shift, or to continue sourcing, from the factory or country.

While brands are increasingly exploiting their collective leverage, such growing buyer power has not necessarily been accompanied by greater buyer responsibility. One of the thorniest questions relates to wage issues. Although brands may publicly support higher wages, such statements have rarely translated into higher prices paid to factories [START_REF] Oka | Brands as Labour Rights Advocates? Potential and Limits of Brand Advocacy in Global Supply Chains[END_REF]. Indeed, prices and margins have been falling in the Bangladeshi garment sector [START_REF] Anner | Squeezing workers' rights in global supply chains: purchasing practices in the Bangladesh garment export sector in comparative perspective[END_REF]. This lack of shared responsibility is a problem not just for supplier factories, workers and producing countries, but also for buyers themselves as they try to bring about positive changes at the industry level. For instance, although ACT, the latest example of collective advocacy, requires member brands to ring-fence labour costs and to continue sourcing from the country in question, these buyer commitments come into force only when industry-level collective bargaining is actually concluded in the country, which has not yet happened. Given brands' questionable track record of keeping their pledges, government officials and industry associations are deeply sceptical of new and bolder initiatives such as ACT.

A key here is to understand the mixed effects buyers have on labour conditions on the one hand, and the heterogeneity of buyers and their constraints on the other. Kabeer (this issue) shows that factories in Bangladesh which sell to European and American buyers have better social outcomes. At the same time, however, buyers' power and sourcing practices have been identified as the main obstacle to improving labour conditions. Indeed, Anner (2019) argues that buyer consolidation and a 'sourcing squeeze' contributed to substandard working conditions and safety issues, culminating in the Rana Plaza disaster.

While brands are reluctant to discuss their responsibility to pay higher prices to factories or change sourcing practices, they do talk about different kinds of responsibility and pressures they are facing. Several firms, particularly German retailers, mentioned that they have a responsibility toward low-income consumers to keep supplying cheap products and they are facing cut-throat competition. Such views appear to be more prominent in Germany, where online retailers and discounters are major players and price competition is incredibly fierce.

Nonetheless, market pressureespecially from online retailersis also threatening high street brands and retailers in the UK and Sweden, even leading to bankruptcies in some cases.

In the context of such competitive market pressures, when these firms are compelled to play a more active role in improving labour conditions in the factories and countries from which they source, this can create internal tensions between departments tasked with CSR responsibilities and those whose focus is on meeting profit targets [START_REF] Ashwin | Varieties of Policy-Practice Decoupling regarding Labor Standards in Global Garment Supply Chains: Comparing Lead Firms in Germany and the UK[END_REF].

Moreover, even well-intentioned firms struggle to coordinate different functions within the organization. Amengual et al. (forthcoming) use micro-level purchase data to show that even retailers with a strong reputation for social sustainability fail to integrate compliance into sourcing decisions. Furthermore, different buyers are acting in different ways, with some leading, others following and the rest free-riding. Some leading brands appear to be exasperated, saying that even they cannot afford to shoulder the whole burden, calling for public regulation to level the playing field.

While the three sets of activities we have discussed have potential to improve labour conditions, buyers' responsibility fundamentally has to include self-regulation and selfalignment as well. Despite the aforementioned challenges, buyers need to review their sourcing behaviour that pushes down prices and shortens lead times, which are currently used paradoxicallyalongside extensive investments in programmes designed to pull conditions up.

CONCLUSION

The Rana Plaza disaster has led to soul-searching and experimentation with new approaches within the garment industry. This article has identified three approaches (auditing, capacity building and advocacy) and the emerging trend of exploiting collective leverage of buyers.

Using empirical research, we have illustrated how buyers perceive the merits, challenges, power and responsibility involved in these activities aimed at improving labour conditions in their supply chains.

Our contributions to the literature are threefold. First, we contribute to the emerging body of work looking at the significance of the Accord (or lack thereof) from buyers' perspectives.

We have shown that the Accord is essentially an auditing approach but, crucially, with collective enforcement. Brands have 'discovered' their collective leverage through the Accord and come to exploit it in the Accord process and beyond. On the other hand, buyers' enhanced leverage has not been matched by greater responsibility. Few brands assist supplier factories in their remedial efforts through increased orders or higher prices, while even fewer share the cost of Accord-related remediation. While this is in line with existing studies which point out the lack of shared responsibility (e.g. [START_REF] Barrett | Five Years after Rana Plaza: The Way Forward[END_REF][START_REF] Scheper | Labour Networks under Supply Chain Capitalism: The Politics of the Bangladesh Accord[END_REF], we have argued that the Accord is only one of many activities buyers are engaged in, and that we need to take a holistic view to better understand buyers' perspectives, motivations and constraints.

Second, we map a set of buyer activities covering not only auditing and capacity building, but also the often neglected element of advocacy, identifying merits and demerits of each approach. The literature has often contrasted the compliance-oriented auditing approach with the collaboration-commitment approach (e.g. [START_REF] Locke | Virtue out of Necessity? Compliance, Commitment, and the Improvement of Labor Conditions in Global Supply Chains[END_REF][START_REF] Lund-Thomsen | Corporate Social Responsibility in Global Value Chains: Where Are We Now and Where Are We Going?[END_REF] but overlooked the advocacy role of buyers. We have built on [START_REF] Oka | Brands as Labour Rights Advocates? Potential and Limits of Brand Advocacy in Global Supply Chains[END_REF] work on brand advocacy and identified different types, merits and constraints. Moreover, we raise issues concerning the promise of capacity building to transform the industry, given its limited uptake among brands and lack of willingness to invest beyond pilot projects. Future research could consider the circumstances to which each of these approaches is best suited (Alexander, 2019b;[START_REF] Oka | Beyond Workplace Compliance? Portfolios of Buyer Engagement in Labour Standards in Global Garment Production[END_REF].

Third, we paint a more nuanced picture of global buyers, who are far from homogeneous and monolithic, speaking to the emerging work on different groups of buyers engaging in collective initiatives such as the Accord and ACT (Ashwin et al., forthcoming;[START_REF] Huber | Progressive and Conservative Firms in Multistakeholder Initiatives: Tracing the Construction of Political CSR Identities within the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh[END_REF]. Our study suggests that firm size, market segment and market pressure are important influences on the kind and extent of activities that buyers engage in, with larger and more visible brands taking the lead. Faced with free-riders in the industry, some leading buyers are calling for more regulation. Such calls from progressive businesses may lie behind the recent growth of national legislation in some buying countries (e.g. France, the Netherlands) obliging multinationals to disclose how they are addressing human rights risks in their global supply chains.

Proposed solutions to the problem of poor labour conditions in supply chains seem to converge on sharing. Scholars have called for shared problem solving [START_REF] Locke | Virtue out of Necessity? Compliance, Commitment, and the Improvement of Labor Conditions in Global Supply Chains[END_REF], creating shared value with stakeholders (Soundararajan and Brown, 2015), shared responsibility [START_REF] Barrett | Five Years after Rana Plaza: The Way Forward[END_REF], and joint liability [START_REF] Anner | Toward Joint Liability in Global Supply Chains: Addressing the Root Causes of Labor Violations in International Subcontracting Networks[END_REF], urging buyers to share their power, knowledge and value. While agreeing with all the above, we emphasize the need to share the burden across all buyers and not just a few leading buyers. Indeed, it is important to recognize the limits of buyer engagement, given that only a subset of buyers voluntarily opt in [START_REF] Ahlquist | Firm Participation in Voluntary Regulatory Initiatives: The Accord, Alliance, and US Garment Importers from Bangladesh[END_REF]. In this sense, the circle is beginning to close, as corporationswhich have been outsourcing production to less regulated environmentsare starting to call for greater public regulation to level the playing field so that all businesses will be compelled to assume greater responsibility.

  presence and close contact are crucial: It's very interesting when you work directly with government as I do, I talk to ministers, see how brands that are local and on the ground, this is what we try to do, you need to have local insights and local mobility. It's very different to people who sit back say in London and write letters. I'm a bit critical that letters sometimes don't achieve anything. It makes you feel good you sign on it. If you really want to have effective influence and action, you need to engage with officials in a very close way. 26

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure 1. Apparel Retail Distribution for Germany, Sweden and the UK, 2017

  guess the challenge for us is, it's great that factories are hitting all of their compliance targets, but commercially they're not getting the orders. It's actually, 'How do you reward the good behaviour with orders?' … which I think is what we're trying to figure out now from a sourcing and quality perspective, that we can give something back to those good suppliers.8

5 CSR Manager, UK Firm 02, interview 21 September 2016. 6 CSR Manager, Swedish Firm 07, interview 19 September 2016. 7 CSR Manager, UK Firm 04, interview 12 January 2017.

I

  CSR Manager, German Firm 06, interview 6 June 2016. 19 CSR Manager, Swedish Firm 07, interview 19 September 2016.

20

CSR Manager, UK Firm 05, interview 16 May 2019.

  23 21 CSR Manager, Swedish Firm 12, interview 12 October 2016. 22 CSR Manager, German Firm 06, interview 8 May 2017. 23 CSR Manager, UK Firm 14, Interview 4 October 2017.

Table 1 .

 1 Top 5 Sourcing Locations for each Country in 2018

		Sources for	Value	Sources for	Value	Sources for	Value
		Germany	(US$	Sweden	(US$	the UK	(US$
			million)		million)		million)
	1	China	6,940	China	659	China	3,736
	2	Bangladesh	4,652	Germany	373	Bangladesh	2,483
	3	Turkey	2,781	Bangladesh	351	Turkey	1,298
	4	Italy	1,381	Denmark	282	Italy	1,088
	5	India	1,253	Netherlands	152	India	1,018
	Source: UN Comtrade online database: https://comtrade.un.org/ [7/22/2019]

Table 2 .

 2 Three Approaches of Buyer Engagement

		Auditing	Capacity Building	Advocacy
	Types	In-house vs. external	In-house vs. external	Ad hoc vs. institutionalized
		Individual vs. collective	Individual vs. collective	Individual vs. collective
				Producing vs. buying country
	Examples	CoC audits, Accord,	In-house programmes,	Boycotts, letter writing,
		Alliance, Amfori BSCI,	BSR HerProject	meetings, ACT
		Better Work
	Merits	Control function,	Can address a range of	Can address industry-wide
		guideline	issues	issue
			Good PR	Good PR
	Challenges	Limited effectiveness	High resource intensity	Size, clout and local presence
			Limited reach and impact	Difficult to convince
				powerful actors
	Basis of	Sourcing from the	Sourcing from the	Sourcing from the country
	buyer power	factory	factory	(vis-à-vis producing country)
	Buyer	Reward good performers	Invest beyond pilot	Deliver on promise (e.g.
	responsibility	Assist remediation effort	projects	price, sourcing)

Source: Authors' construction

Data from the Euromonitor online database, 'Passport': https://www.portal.euromonitor.com/portal/magazine/homemain [7/22/2019]

Data from Changes in the Governance of Garment Global Production Networks: Lead Firm, Supplier and Institutional Responses to the Rana Plaza Disaster project database. https://www.wiwiss.fuberlin.de/forschung/Garments/index.html

Procurement Manager, UK Firm 07, interview 17 February 2017.

CSR Manager, German Firm 06, interview 6 June 2016.

CSR Manager, German Firm 07, interview 13 June 2016.

CSR Manager, UK Firm 01, interview 16 September 2016.

CSR Manager, Swedish Firm 08, interview 20 December 2016.

CSR Manager, Swedish Firm 04, interview 16 December 2016.

CSR Manager, German Firm 06, interview 8 March 2017.

For example, in September 2012, as reported by Radio Sweden, 5 September 2012.

Procurement Manager, German Firm 02, interview 20 April 2016.

Informal talk at an industry event, 13 February 2019.

We are very grateful to Elke Schüßler and Nora Lohmeyer for sharing their German interview data. We gratefully acknowledge funding by the Volkswagen Foundation for the project 'Changes in the Governance of Garment Global Production Networks: Lead Firm, Supplier and Institutional Responses to the Rana Plaza Disaster' under the European and Global Challenges Programme.

Ethics 123(1): 11-22.


M F Mbouopda
email: mf.mbouopda@gmail.com

P Melatagia Yonta

Named Entity Recognition in Low-resource Languages using Cross-lingual distributional word representation

Keywords: Natural Language Processing, Named Entity Recognition, Neural Network, Annotation Projection, Low resource language, Cross-lingual MOTS-CLES : Traitement Automatique du

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in many NLP applications that seek to identify and classify expressions such as people, location, and organization names. Many NER systems have been developed, but the annotated data needed for good performances are not available for low-resource languages, such as Cameroonian languages. In this paper we exploit the low frequency of named entities in text to define a new suitable cross-lingual distributional representation for named entity recognition. We build the first Ewondo (a Bantu low-resource language of Cameroon) named entities recognizer by projecting named entity tags from English using our word representation. In terms of Recall, Precision and F-score, the obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed distributional representation of words RESUME. La reconnaissance des entités nommées (REN) est une tâche fondamentale du TALN dont le but est d'identifier les expressions telles que les noms de personnes, de lieux et d'organisations dans un texte. Il existe de nos jours plusieurs systèmes de REN, cependant les données nécessaires pour les utiliser dans le traitement des langues peu dotées telles que les langues camerounaises ne sont pas disponibles. Nous exploitons le fait que les entités nommées apparaissent rarement dans les textes pour définir une nouvelle représentation distributionnelle interlingue des mots, qui soit adaptée à la REN. En utilisant notre représentation, nous projectons les entités nommées de l'anglais vers l'ewondo (une langue bantou du Cameroun); nous obtenons donc le tout premier modèle de reconnaissance des entités nommées en langue ewondo. Les résultats en terme de précision, rappel et f-mesure montrent l'efficacité de notre représentation

Introduction

Expressions such as people names, organization names and location names are so important in almost all Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications so that there is a dedicated task that focuses on them. This task is called Named Entities Recognition (NER) and its goal is to firstly identify those expressions and secondly classify them.

NLP aims to equip computers with the capability to communicate with humans in natural way, that means using human language. As NLP is important for resource-rich languages such as English, French, or German, it is also important for low-resource languages. A language is said to be low-resource when there is not (eventually not enough) annotated corpora, name dictionaries, good morphological analyzers, POS taggers, treebank, ... in that language. Ewondo is one of the most studied (by linguists) language in Cameroon and, as some Cameroonian languages, it is already taught in high schools and specialized training centers; however, it is a resource poor language.

Nowadays, machine learning (ML) approaches are popularly used in NER because they are easily trainable and are adaptable to different languages while rule-based approaches lack the ability of copying with the problem of portability and robustness. However the most performant ML approaches use supervised learning algorithm [START_REF] Ehrman | Building a Multilingual Named Entity Annotated Corpus Using Annotation Projection[END_REF]. Hence they cannot be used to process low-resource languages because annotated data needed for learning are not available. More recently, new NLP systems based on cross-language projection of linguistic annotations from a resource-rich language to a low-resource language were developed and they achieve good performances [START_REF] Yarowsky | Inducing Multilingual Text Analysis Tools Via Robust Projection Across Aligned Corporas[END_REF]. The key idea of projection of linguistic annotations can be summarized as follows: through word alignment in parallel text corpora, the annotations are transferred from the source (resource-rich) language to the target (under-resourced) language, and the resulting annotations can be used for a supervised training in the target language. However, the poor performance of word alignment algorithms constitutes a principal limitation of approaches based on projection of linguistic annotations. As many Cameroonian languages, Ewondo is a morphologically rich language compared to English and French since it has agglutinative or inflectional morphology. In such languages, the production of hundreds of words from a given root is possible, which results in the data sparsity problem. The first consequence of this property is that a word in Ewondo can be translated to a sequence of words in English and hence English-Ewondo word alignment algorithms would perform poorly. For instance the Ewondo phrase "Akore ya wo ṅ awu" is translated by the Glosbe platform 1 as "F reedom f rom a morbid f ear of death".

In this paper, we present a new cross-lingual distributional representation that give very good performances for the NER task. We use this representation to efficiently project NER tags from English to Ewondo using a model inspired from [START_REF] Zennaki | Utilisation des Réseaux de Neurones Récurrents pour la Projection Interlingue d'Etiquettes Morpho-syntaxiques à Partir d'un Corpus Parallèle[END_REF]. The model would perform as well in any other language since the projection is done without any word alignment, without any knowledge about the target language and there is no need to choose a similarity measure.

The rest of this paper is as follows: Section 2 presents related work; Section 3 presents the Zennaki et al. [START_REF] Zennaki | Utilisation des Réseaux de Neurones Récurrents pour la Projection Interlingue d'Etiquettes Morpho-syntaxiques à Partir d'un Corpus Parallèle[END_REF] POS tagging model, adapted for NER. The proposed distributional representation is described in Section 4. The details of experiments and results are reported in Section 5 and Section 6 concludes this paper.

Related work

Regarding the target language, named entity recognition methods can be classify in two groups: the first group contains methods for resource-rich languages and the second one is for methods that are applicable on low-resource languages.

Named entity recognition for resource-rich language

State of the art of named entity system for resource-rich language rely heavily on hand-crafted features which are domain and language-specific [START_REF] Lample | Neural Architectures for Named Entity Recognition[END_REF]. A Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based English named entities recognizer in which the basic input feature is character instead of word as it is most of the time have been constructed by [START_REF] Klein | Named Entity Recognition with Character-Level Models[END_REF]. This charater-level HMM got 83% of F-score on the CoNLL-2003 English test set which is better than the corresponding word-level HMM by a difference of about 10%. A Support Vector Machine (SVM) has been used to construct a named entity recognizer with hundreds of thousands of features [START_REF] Mayfield | Named Entity Recognition Using Hundreds of Thousands of Features[END_REF] that give an F-score of 84%. The goal was to be able to use many features without overfitting and without high computational cost. As for other SVM models of NER found in the state of the art, it uses different contextual information (surrounding words) along with the variety of orthographic word-level features. SVM based NER models are more efficient than HMM to deal with the non-independent and overlapping features of the language. Most recently, researchers proposed methods in which the effort needed for feature engineering is considerably reduce. For instance a neural architecture that automatically detect word and character-level features using hybrid bidirectional LSTM and CNN architecture [START_REF] Chiu | Named Entity Recognition with Bidirectional LSTM-CNNs[END_REF], eliminating the most feature engineering.

Because these methods are language-specific and need large amount of annotated data to perform, they can not be used for low-resource languages.

Named entity recognition for low-resource languages

For low-resource languages, many works are based on annotation projection. Introduced in 2001, annotation projection is the process of transferring annotations from one language to another language [START_REF] Yarowsky | Inducing Multilingual Text Analysis Tools Via Robust Projection Across Aligned Corporas[END_REF]. For instance, in order to build the first named entity annotated corpus for Malay, named entity tags have been projected from English (resource-rich) to Malay (low-resource) language with an F-score of 90% on their test set [START_REF] Zamin | Projecting Named Entity Tags From Resource-Rich Language to a Resource Poor Language[END_REF]. Based on a Malay-English align corpus, their method can be resume is three steps: they have firstly annotated the English part of the corpus using UIUC named entity tagger [START_REF] Roth | Design Challenges and Misconceptions in Named Entity Recognition[END_REF]. Secondly they have used a Malay-English dictionary to align English and Malay words according to a bi-gram Dice coefficient. Finally, they projected named entity tags using the word alignment obtained previously; however, they applied some language-specific rules (mostly regular expressions) for more confidence. One of the most important difference between this method and the process we are proposing in this paper is that no assumption on the target language is required and hence no languagespecific rule is used. A multilingual NER has been built by projecting entity tags from English to French, Spanish, German, Czech and Russian with 94% of recall [START_REF] Ehrman | Building a Multilingual Named Entity Annotated Corpus Using Annotation Projection[END_REF]. After the annotation of the English side of the corpus with an in-house NER system [START_REF] Steingerger | Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition[END_REF], they used a phrase-based statistical machine translation [START_REF] Koehn | Statistical phrase-based translation[END_REF] to align named entities found in the English side with their corresponding portion of text on the target side. They used three different methods for projection, starting from the most rigorous to the most tolerant. They started by the string matching and if it fails, they continue with consonant signature matching. For cases where consonant signature return no result, they apply a Levenshtein edit distance on consonant signature and projection is applied when this distance is greater or equal to 0.7. The approach we are using in this paper is different as it uses a neural network that learn itself the best similarity measure, and no word alignment between language is required. Furthermore, it is not easy to get a phrase-based machine translation for resource-low languages. Distributional regularities in monolingual data, projected information across closely related languages and human linguist judgments have been exploited to quickly build a NER system for Sorani Kurdish and Tajik resource-low languages of Western Iranian [START_REF] Littell | Named Entity Recognition for Linguistic Rapid Response in Low-Resource Languages : Sorani Kurdish and Tajik[END_REF]. They wanted to build a usable NER system in very few time, although not perfect. Instead of relying on elaborated and robust linguistic resources built ahead of time, they opportunistically incorporate linguistic theory, informal and non-expert intuitions about the language and the target application, and resources adapted from closely related languages while avoiding extensive manual annotation. Non-experts are linguists that do not speak the target languages but are familiar with the structure of human languages in general. They have some knowledge about the family of target languages, and they can rapidly have intuitions about the languages by reading reference grammar and exploring data. The approach used in this paper makes no assumption about the target language or its family. Using a set of language-independent features grouped in lexical, non-lexical, gazetteer and wikifier features, a cross-lingual NER trained only on English have been built [START_REF] Tsai | Cross-lingual named entity recognition via wikification[END_REF]. The model can be used to perform NER in any language on Wikipedia. The strength of the model is that it only requires multilingual Wikipedia, no sentence-aligned or word-aligned parallel text is needed, however the model perform a word-alignment in background in order to align words in the target language to English word. Mayhew et al. [START_REF] Mayhew | Cheap Translation for Cross-Lingual Named Entity Recognition[END_REF] used Cheap translation to project named entities from one language to another. Because lexicons are much cheaper and easier obtainable than parallel corpus [START_REF] Mausam | Panlingual lexical translation via probabilistic inference[END_REF], they decided to rely their translation only on a lexicon instead of a parallel corpus as in [START_REF] Koehn | Statistical phrase-based translation[END_REF]. [START_REF] Cotterell | Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition with Cross-Lingual, Character-Level Neural Conditional Random Fields[END_REF] trained a conditional random field model for NER in low-resource language by augmenting the small amount of data in the low-resource language with data coming from a set of rich languages related to the target low-resource language. As stated by the authors, this approach is different from annotation projection since it requires the low-resource language data to be annotated.

State of the art named entity tags projection methods have two main sources of error in common: word alignment and similarity measure. Solving those issues would lead to more accurate projection. Furthermore, making no assumption on the target language is better for generalization. In the next section we present a model that overcomes these limitations for the Part Of Speech Tagging (POS Tagging) task and that we are going to modify in Section 4 for NER. The modification is based on a new cross-lingual distributional representation. There is no report of named entities recognition work prior to our experiment for Ewondo and more generally for any Cameroonian language. Moreover, the proposed approach is, in our knowledge the first attempt to tackle NER for low-resource languages by projecting annotations without word alignment nor similarity measure, and in which no language-specific feature is used.

The Zennaki et al. model

Part Of Speech Tagging is a task of NLP that aims to assign to each word in a text its part of speech. Zennaki et al. [START_REF] Zennaki | Utilisation des Réseaux de Neurones Récurrents pour la Projection Interlingue d'Etiquettes Morpho-syntaxiques à Partir d'un Corpus Parallèle[END_REF] used a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to projects 12 part of speech tags from English to French, German, Spanish and Greek. The model is based on a simple principle stipulating that if we can find a space where a word in the source language and its translation in the target language have the same representation then an artificial neural network can learn from words in the source language and make predictions on the words in the target language. Since a word and its translation will always appear in the same bi-phrase in a parallel corpus, they represent each word w in the bi-text (parallel corpus) by a binary vector V w of size N (the number of bi-phrases in the bi-text) called distributional signature where:

V w [i] = 1 if w appears in the i th bi-phrase, 0 otherwise. (1)
The neural network architecture is described as follow:

-the input layer has N neurons, -there is a first hidden layer with 640 neurons followed by the second hidden layer which contains 160 neurons, -the output layer has 12 neurons and softmax is applied, -the activation function of every neuron in the network is sigmoid -and there is a feedback loop from the first hidden layer to the input layer. The model has been tested using a multilingual corpus extracted from Europarl [START_REF] Koehn | A Parallel Corpus for Statistical Machine Translation[END_REF] and achieved more than 75% of accuracy for the POS tagging. The model suffers of two main problems: firstly, words that are not in the vocabulary are not represented and are tagged just according to their context; secondly, the memory and time needed to use the model increase too much with the size of the bi-text used. However the model has three great advantages:

1) no need to choose a similarity measure, the best one is implicitly learned by the RNN,

2) the same model can be used for many languages without any change. Indeed the only thing to do is to translate the resource-rich language text used for training in the new language,

3) the model is trained only on the source language (resource-rich language).

We have exploited these properties to build a named entity tagger for low-resource languages. This tagger is described in the next section.

Named entities tagger for low-resource languages

Transferring knowledge from one language to another requires the ability to transfer features from the source language to the target language; however features such as surrounding words, prefixes or suffixes are not easily transferable between languages because of their syntactical differences. Hence, the more the source and the target languages are linguistically similar, the better is the projection.

The distributional representation described in [START_REF] Zennaki | Utilisation des Réseaux de Neurones Récurrents pour la Projection Interlingue d'Etiquettes Morpho-syntaxiques à Partir d'un Corpus Parallèle[END_REF] is very impressive because it is not based on any language, we say it is language-free. Our model also uses distributional signature to represent words, but it is not binary. Indeed, named entity expressions are less frequent in text than expressions that are not named entities; considering this observation, we believe that using word frequency will lead to a better distributional representation for named entities. The term frequency or the frequency of a word in a document is the weight of that word in the document, computed according to its number of occurrences in the document [START_REF] Manning | Scoring, term weighting and the vector space model[END_REF]. This is a powerful notion, widely used in information retrieval. The frequency of a word in a document is the number of its occurrences divided by the total number of word in the document. It is a way to measure the importance of that word in the document. To reuse this notion, we have to decide what we call a document in our context. We have identify three possibilities:

-Corpus-based term frequency where the corpus (the bi-text) is considered as being a whole document. In this case, the term frequency is language independent and we will have a single document.

-Side-based term frequency that is only based on the words from the same language. Here, each side of the bi-text is a document, hence we have two documents: The rich side and the low-resource side.

-Phrase-based term frequency where each phrase in considered as being a document. Here, a word has as much frequencies as there are phrases in the corpus.

Given the definition of the document, the term frequency of a word w is given as follows:

tf w = nbOcc(w) nbW C (2)
where nbOcc(w) is the number of occurrences of w in the document containing it and nbW C is the total number of words in that side.

In information retrieval, it is sometimes a good idea to normalize the term frequency. We used the following normalizations [START_REF] Manning | Scoring, term weighting and the vector space model[END_REF]:

1) natural: norm(tf w ) = tf w 2) binary: norm(tf w ) = 1 if tf w > 0, and 0 otherwise 3) logarithmic: norm(tf w ) = 1 + log(tf w ) 4) maximal: norm(tf w ) = 0.5 + 0.5

× tfw max({tfm|∀m ∈ document}) 5) log average: norm(tf w ) = 1+log(tfw) 1+log(avg({tfm|∀ m ∈document}))
Given the previous definition of the frequency of a word, we define a general crosslingual distributional representation of a word w as being a vector V w , of size N and with each component defined as follows:

V w [i] = norm( 1 tfw ) if w appear in the i th bi-phrase, 0 otherwise. ( 3
)
Hence, the distributional representation used by [START_REF] Zennaki | Utilisation des Réseaux de Neurones Récurrents pour la Projection Interlingue d'Etiquettes Morpho-syntaxiques à Partir d'un Corpus Parallèle[END_REF] is the side-base term frequency coupled with the binary normalization. This representation does not take advantage of the observation that named entities are less frequent in text than non name entities. Using natural, logarithmic, maximal or log average normalization, it would be easier to distinguish between name entities and non named entities since all these alternatives clearly take the word frequency (or more precisely the inverse term frequency) into account. Using one of these four representation, the distributional representation (given by Equation 3) of a named entity is more likely to be further from the null vector; while the distributional representation of a non named entity is more likely to be closer to the null vector. Therefore, a binary classifier can be easy trained to differentiate named entities from non-named entities.

Our approach is based on a feedforward neural network with two hidden layers, more precisely the architecture is as follow:

-the number of neurons in the input layer is set to the size of distributional signature (the number of bi-phrases in the bi-text). For experiments described in Section 5 it is 210 neurons, -the first hidden layer has 640 neurons each using sigmoid activation function, -the second hidden layer has 160 neurons and use sigmoid activation function, -the output layer has four neurons for our four entity classes PERSON, OR-GANIZATION, LOCATION and MISCELLANEOUS plus neuron for the non named entity class OTHER.

-the output is normalized using softmax function.

We have an empirical guess of the internal behavior of our model: some of its first neurons behave like a binary classifier to check if the input is a named entity or not. If the answer is "NO" the model outputs OTHER. If the answer is "YES", the remaining neurons are used to identify the specific named entity class of the input. In the next section, the experimental evaluation of our model is presented.

Experimental Results

To test our model, we need a parallel corpus containing the target low-resource language aligned with a rich language. The alignment must be phrase-based and not wordbased. The corpus must have named entity annotations at least on the rich side. As far as we know, such a dataset do not exists in the literature; hence we manually created one using English as the rich side and Ewondo, a Bantu language of Cameroon as the low-resource side. Data are extracted from an online bible2 . For each verse we have an English version and an Ewondo version. Each side of the bi-text has been manually annotated using Brat3 and the help of an Ewondo native speaker. The named entities tagset used is described in Table 1 and the statistic of the bi-text is presented in Table 2, Table 3 and Table 4. As shown in Table 2 the number of words in Ewondo is not the same as in English; there is no bijection between English and Ewondo, hence word alignment might not be suitable here. Table 3 and Table 4 confirm the observation that named entities are less frequent in text than other expressions; more precisely the proportion of named entities is only 14% in the whole text and about 10% when considering only the vocabulary.

We used only the vocabulary to train and test our model. The training set is the rich side (RS) of the corpus, and the test set is the low-resource side (LRS). We trained the model over 10 epochs using 10-fold cross validation. We stop the training if the validation loss is the same between two consecutive epochs. In order to assess the robustness of our model to random initialization of the network weights, the model is trained 10 times with different random initialization of the weights. We reported the mean and standard 4 -Named entities distribution in the vocabulary deviation of precision, recall and F 1 -score. The source code and the dataset we used are available here 4 We have built our baseline by performing the projection using the distributional signature proposed by [START_REF] Zennaki | Utilisation des Réseaux de Neurones Récurrents pour la Projection Interlingue d'Etiquettes Morpho-syntaxiques à Partir d'un Corpus Parallèle[END_REF]. The network architecture is the feed forward neural network described in Section 4. The result are reported in Table 5.

Precision

Recall For each term frequency definition (phrase, side or corpus-based) and for each normalization (natural, logarithmic, maximal and log average) presented in Section 4, we have run our model and reported the precision, recall and F1-score in Table 6. This table shows in bold the highest precision, recall and F1-score for each definition of the term frequency; the lowest performances are underlined.

Regardless of the definition of the term frequency, the best results are obtained using the natural normalization. In fact, with the phrase-based term frequency, the projection is 4. https://github.com/frankl1/Word2vec-For-NER-In-Low-Resource-Languages performed with a precision of about 75%, a recall of about 67% and a F1 score of about 70%; comparing to the baseline, this is an improvement of about 6% for the precision, 20% for the recall and 10% for the F 1 -score. The worst results are given by the log average normalization, and is even worse than the baseline.

Using the side-based term frequency leads to a slightly better projection comparing to the phrase-based term frequency. By the way, the projection improves up to about 78%, the recall up to about 67% and the F 1 -score up to about 71%. It is also important to notice that the worst results here (obtained using the maximal normalization) is very closed the the baseline. This is because the side-based term frequency is more likely to give the same representation to a word and its translation and hence produce a better cross-lingual representation than the phrase-based term frequency

The corpus-based term frequency also produced better results than the phrase-based. These results are very closed those produced by the side-base term frequency. Indeed, the projection precision is 78%, the recall is 64% and the F 1 -score is about 70%. In fact, using the corpus-based term frequency is also more likely to give very similar distributional representations to a word and its translation.

In any case, experimental results validate our hypothesis: taking into account the low frequency of named entities is important for the projection of named entity tags. Furthermore, performances on the test set (projection) show that unlike the model from [START_REF] Zennaki | Utilisation des Réseaux de Neurones Récurrents pour la Projection Interlingue d'Etiquettes Morpho-syntaxiques à Partir d'un Corpus Parallèle[END_REF], the proposed model performs pretty well as an English named entity annotator. In fact, the validation set is classified with a precision of about 85%, a recall of about 80% and an F 1 -score of about 80%. Instead of the feed forward neural network, we have also run experimentations with the recurrent neural network from [START_REF] Zennaki | Utilisation des Réseaux de Neurones Récurrents pour la Projection Interlingue d'Etiquettes Morpho-syntaxiques à Partir d'un Corpus Parallèle[END_REF] and the performance was not significantly different. Therefore, we think the knowledge about the past (coming from the recurrence) is too much different from English to Ewondo.

Conclusion

In this paper we have proposed a way to quickly construct a named entity annotator for low-resource languages using cross-lingual distributional representation. We have defined a generalized cross-lingual representation based on the observation that named entities are less frequent in text than non named entities. We have coupled the proposed representation with a 2 hidden layers network to project named entities from English to Ewondo (a Bantu language of Cameroon). We have done several experiments with different instances of the proposed cross-lingual representation. In each case the model performs well on the used dataset. More precisely, we have projected named entity tags from English to Ewondo with a precision of 78.15%, a recall of 67.29% and an F1-score of 71.23%. We think that the proposed distributional signature can be used in any classification task where the classes of interest are more frequent (or less frequent) than the class of other expressions. We will continue to verify this hypothesis on other NLP tasks. Moreover, we intent to assess our model on a larger corpus, eventually from different domains. Elsewhere, we will try to reduce the size of our representation using cross-lingual word embedding techniques.

Table 1 -

 1 Named entities tagset

	NE tags	Meaning		Examples
	PER	a person name		Yesus → Jesus
	ORG	an organization name	bësadukea → Sadducees
	LOC	a location name	Yerusalem → Jerusalem
	MISC	others named entities Mfufub Nsisim → Holy spirit
	O	non named entities		kòbò → to speak
			English Ewondo
		# of sentences	210	210
		# of words	4753	4185
		# of distinct words	912	1029

Table 2 -

 2 Corpus statistics

	PER	ORG	LOC MISC	O
	English 5.87% 0.02% 0.95% 2.51% 90.62%
	Ewondo 7.08% 0.05% 1.09% 2.68% 89.07%

Table 3 -

 3 Named entities distribution in the whole text

	PER	ORG	LOC MISC	O
	English 8.77% 0.10% 1.95% 1.84% 87.32%
	Ewondo 8.18% 0.19% 1.82% 1.15% 88.64%
	Table

Table 5 -

 5 Zennaki et al. Model performance (average on 10 runs)

	F 1 -Score

ARIMA Journal -Volume 33 -2020

Named entity recognition in low-resource languages using cross-lingual distributional world representation 5

ARIMA Journal -Volume 33 -2020

https://www.bible.com

http://brat.nlplab.org