Human Rights and Environmental Due Diligence in Soy and Beef Supply Chains from Brazil: Towards Environmental Justice?

Governments in the Global North have recently begun to regulate supply chains with mandatory measures such as new laws building on a Human Rights and Environmental Due Diligence (HREDD) approach, with the aim of reducing existing accountability gaps. These laws require companies to identify and mitigate human rights and environmental risks and include enforcement measures that penalize companies that fail to do so. Yet it remains unclear to what extent this new wave of policy innovation is actually contributing to the three dimensions of environmental justice in global supply chains: distribution, recognition and participation. This paper will first analyze the institutional design of new and emergent HREDD laws at EU level and in Member States from an environmental justice perspective. Second, we will shift the focus on the first experiences with the implementation of the pioneering French Duty of Vigilance law (2017), by analyzing how companies involved in soy and beef trade from Brazil have complied with the law and related accountability dynamics. Third, based on our findings from multi-sited field research in Brazil, we will discuss how diverse stakeholders from sites of production have perceived and acted upon new HREDD policies. Taken together, we will discuss the potential and limitations of HREDD to institutionalize environmental justice in global supply chains. While new laws might contribute to better traceability systems and to improve corporate sustainability management, their contribution to systemic sustainability transformation and to reduce social inequalities at global and national scales in producing sites is likely to be limited. Furthermore, it is important to shed light on the risk that new legal requirements to exercise HREDD might lead to further corporate concentration in global supply chains.