Being one of the worst industries in the world in terms of human and environmental abuse, the tex tile industry is in urgent need for sustainable transformation. Textile workers in the global south belong to a particularly precarious group of workers; they are mainly women, often young, migrant and in vulnerable job market positions. Social audit is a practice that brands engage in to measure, understand and report on social and ethical performance in their supply chain. However, research shows that social audits marginally improve worker rights and a lot of structural non-compliance is recidivist: that is, it is repetitive and pernicious. Therefore, the discussion of going beyond auditing towards distributed communicative governance among participant organizations in the supply chain is becoming both attractive and urgent. In this paper we present a research proposal that explores alternative practices to social auditing . . .