Critical Global Value Chains Laws

Abstract

The European Union's regulation of corporate abuses regarding human rights and the environment in Global Value Chains (GVCs) is supposedly transformative. Central to this regulatory framework is the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D), which mandates that companies identify, prevent, and mitigate adverse impacts on human rights and the environment throughout their value chains. Delving into the implications of such a semiotic object by referring to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, developed in A Thousand Plateaus, the paper critically investigates this paradigm shift. To do so, the paper makes the concept of rhizome instrumental, providing tools for situating law in a co-produced landscape rather than separating law from the landscape. Moving the analysis from an abstract legal plane towards an immanent, material plane, the paper scrutinizes how the meta-norm of due diligence operates both as a regulatory discharge to companies and as a mechanism for co-producing regulatory outcomes through data-based, knowledge-based, ultimately value-based framings. Entering the landscape of corporate due diligence means considering the diverse data, instruments, and expertise involved in assessing the socio environmental impact of an economic activity. How do the entanglements of expert knowledge and institutional regimes produce normative discourses constitutive of an ‘impact’. Overall, this paper comes from a personal sense of dissatisfaction with the current state of a new regulatory object referred to as GVCs Laws.  It is then a first attempt to reflexively look at these complex structures without overlooking their affects and effects. The contribution seeks to inform what ultimately shape the meaning of ‘impact’, of ‘due diligence’ and how does this subsequently shape a specific – and not desirable nor reflexive – pathway for socio-ecological transitions.