The devil is in the detail—The need for a decolonizing turn and better environmental accountability in global supply chain regulations: A comment

The politics of supply chain regulations: Towards foreign corporate accountability in the area of human rights and the environment?

“…While standard accountability is characterized by clear relationships between accountability holders and accountability wielders, companies within global supply chains tend to be accountable to different constituencies, among them not only consumers and shareholders, but also rightsholders and stakeholders from the Global South. Some studies have used the terms "accountability-by-proxy" (Koenig-Archibugi & Macdonald, 2013) or "surrogate accountability" (Rubenstein, 2007) to analyze situations in which activists, consumers or importing countries in the Global North seek to advocate for the rights of affected groups in the Global South and hold companies accountable on their behalf (e.g., Kramarz et al, 2022;Mason et al, 2023;Partzsch, 2021). However, while these studies have analyzed the actions of specific actor groups in defending victims of corporate abuses, we still need to move forward and develop a concept that assesses FCA more broadly, encompassing accountability relationships involving states, consumers, civil society, and market actors at both ends of global supply chains.…”

“…We conceive of input and output accountability as intrinsically linked and therefore, we also pay careful attention to input accountability and institutional design, allowing us to get a more complete understanding of foreign accountability dynamics. Indeed, as Mason et al (2023) argue "the devil is in the detail" of due diligence regulations. Output accountability can, moreover, be divided in several stages as discussed below.…”

“…The EU is currently an important forum for elite learning wherein FCA norms are spread and contested. Besides from framing the norms, the power and the legitimacy of the actors involved in the domestication of the norms are also likely to matter greatly (see Mason et al, 2023). Hence, linked to our research questions 1, 3, and 4 it is important to ask, What actors are able to influence the policy formulation and implementation of supply chain regulations, and which actors tend to be excluded?…”

“…Moreover, it is important to take into account how institutional arrangements in producing sites interact with supply chain regulations from the demand side, contributing to undermine or enable FCA (cf. Bartley, 2018Bartley, , 2021Mason et al, 2023). The institutional perspective, highlighting legacies and issues of institutional fit, leads to the following specific questions: How do different institutional environments shape policy formulation and implementation processes?…”

“…More recently, however, middle positions have emerged that discuss not so much whether there should be voluntary or mandatory measures, but rather how the specific relationships between such measures should look like. To account for this new trend, the contribution by Mason et al (2023) goes beyond the fundamental divide between mandatory and voluntary rules and analyzes discourses about specific institutional design features of supply chain regulations. Furthermore, beside statecentered and market-based policy solutions, the authors identify a polycentric discourse that advocates in favor of a combination between moderate state interventions and market-based solutions that could be achieved through collaborative policy-making, such as multi-stakeholder dialogues and public-private partnerships.…”