NGO stories about accountability in global supply chains

NGOs in Europe and the United States are advocating for ethical consumption and new laws requiring importing companies to be more sustainable in their global supply. The campaigns address accountability challenges in global supply chains. Narrative analysis has proven to be a useful tool to reveal underlying assumptions about agency. Scholars have criticized that, in past campaigns on ‘conflict’ minerals, NGOs used simple narratives leveraging a “white savourism” (Vogel 2021). In particular, with regard to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Autesserre (2012) identified three dominant narratives forming a coherent but simplified storyline: Illegal exploitation of minerals was presented as the main cause of violence, sexual abuse as the worst consequence, and outside intervention strengthening state authority as the primary solution to the conflict. She and other scholars, who have been working on the DRC, have argued that, by understating the complexity of the armed conflict in the country, NGOs pushed for policies that have actually exacerbated the human rights situation on the ground. Against the backdrop of this debate, this paper systematically studies the narratives on agency and accountability that NGOs use in current campaigns for an EU Supply Chain Directive. The paper begins with an introduction to ethical consumption and mandatory due diligence in resource trade, focusing on ‘conflict’ minerals. The second part explains how NGO campaigns risk to disempower people in the upstream part of supply chains through narratives about their non-agency, and how we can proceed methodologically to trace such narratives. The third part of the paper is then devoted to a review of the narratives discussed in the literature with regard to campaigns about ‘conflict’ minerals. The fourth part studies whether we also see such narratives in the current campaigns of the European Coalition for Corporate Justice (ECCJ) for the EU Supply Chain Directive. The analysis is based on NGO publications and semi-structured interviews with NGO and business representatives. The paper finds that, while current NGO campaigns are not framing illegal exploitation as the crux of the problem, they blame corporate greed and consumers’ unreflective purchases as the cause of grievances in global supply chains. Although women and girls are highlighted as victims of European corporate greed, sexual violence is presented as only one among many other problems. Similar to what Autesserre criticizes, however, local people are narrated again as being victims and having no agency themselves. Simple narratives about cause and consequence result in the demand for the EU Supply Chain Directive, which is meant to strengthen state authority in exporting countries, as a solution. The shared story does not provide grounds for an understanding of governments which are perpetrators themselves, and NGOs neglect forms of social organization other than state authority in exporting countries. Like in earlier campaigns, outside political intervention is narrated to be the primary solution. To address such ‘white saviourism’, the paper suggests that NGOs should give more emphasis to the agency of people in the upstream part of global supply chains.