The European Union and its member states have recently adopted binding measures to hold companies legally responsible for the adverse impacts of their business activities, including human rights and environmental due diligence laws, import restrictions and other forms of trade-based legislation, as well as more encompassing disclosure and reporting rules. This significant shift from voluntary to mandatory measures holds the promise of enhancing a new form of ‘foreign corporate accountability’ for companies operating on the EU market; however, incipient implementation of several laws has already uncovered a range of challenges and potential unintended consequences that warrant greater systematic academic attention.
This suite of regulatory innovations - including but not limited to the Swiss ESG reporting obligation, French Duty of Vigilance law, the German Supply Chain Act, and the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, Conflict Mineral Regulation, Deforestation Regulation, Forced Labor Ban, Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive - represents a sea change for different actors involved in the governance of global supply chains, and the initiation of a new era of EU policy making. Questions regarding new supply chain regulations’ legitimacy, effectiveness, and implications loom large.
To date, researchers in hitherto fragmented subfields – such as regulatory governance, environmental governance, EU public policy, business and human rights, development studies, and EU law – have begun to examine this new phenomenon from their respective vantage points. However, we are still missing greater systematization of existing insights, especially regarding comparative insights on laws’ policy developments, implementation, and implications across different sectors and producing country contexts. This workshop will provide an opportunity to gain such comparative insights by bringing together researchers from a range of subfields that engage with our driving questions. It will further allow the creation of a cohesive interdisciplinary research network, enabling participating scholars to coordinate their future research agendas and pursue ongoing collaborations in an effort to develop comparative and generalizable knowledge, thus contributing to advance the research frontier on new supply chain regulations. Finally, this workshop will place this rapidly growing and important research topic in EU policymaking on the agenda of the ECPR.
Grabs, J., & Fatimah, Z. (2023). 2023 database of disclosure, due diligence, and trade-based supply chain legislation of potential relevance for the coffee sector. Universitat Ramon Llull, ESADE Business School. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10728164
Gustafsson, M.-T., Schilling-Vacaflor, A., & Lenschow, A. (2023). The politics of supply chain regulations: Towards foreign corporate accountability in the area of human rights and the environment? Regulation & Governance, 17(4), 853–869. https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12526
Schilling-Vacaflor, A., & Gustafsson, M.-T. (2024). Towards more sustainable global supply chains? Company compliance with new human rights and environmental due diligence laws. Environmental Politics, 33(3), 422–443. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2023.2221983
1: How did the policy development processes of supply chain regulations unfold, and which actors were most relevant?
2: How coherent are the various supply chain regulations, and what are consequences of policy (in)coherence?
3: How are implementation processes unfolding to date, and with what (unintended) consequences?
4: Do business, civil society, and government actors perceive supply chain regulations to be legimate?
5: How does the passage of supply chain regulations influence the regulatory landscape in other jurisdictions?
1: Theoretical and empirical contributions addressing the core questions
2: Contributions from different disciplinary backgrounds
3: Studies using a range of different methods
4: In-depth case studies, as well as contributions with a comparative approach
5: Comparisons of different legislations, issue areas, or implementing actors
6: Contributions that focus on both sides of the supply chain
7: Contributions both from junior and senior scholars
8: We aim for a balanced representation of participants’ gender, subfields, and geographic locations
