Regulation and Reputation – Business and Human Rights as Foreign Policy

Although the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights have mostly been implemented by national governments via National Action Plans (NAPs), there is a growing chorus of voices calling for legislation that mandates human rights due diligence. NAPs are most often drafted by foreign ministries and function, as this article argues, primarily as foreign policy instruments rather than as true regulation. This article considers the motivations for adopting two different approaches to implementing the UN Guiding Principles using a comparative case study research design. The first case, France, produced the world’s first comprehensive legislation for mandatory human rights due diligence and a NAP that focuses heavily on implementing that legislation. The second case, Sweden, has a NAP that is mostly a foreign policy that emphasizes responsible business conduct as nation branding, despite having committed to taking a “wait and see” approach on mandatory due diligence. The article considers different motivations for these divergent approaches to business and human rights policy and argues that different conceptions of national reputation informed the two distinct outcomes.