LIST OF PANELS

New human rights and environmental due diligence regulations: Towards hardened foreign accountability?

New human rights and environmental due diligence regulations were adopted or are currently under discussion in states that are main importers of agro-commodities, for instance from the European Union (EU), the United States, Canada and Australia. Scholars have argued that public policies for regulating global commodity chains could contribute to accountability and press corporate actors to assume responsibility for their socio-environmental impacts in distant places (e.g. Bartley 2014; Eberlein et al. 2014). However, the concept of ‘accountability’ has mainly developed with reference to the national scale and more recently for analyzing private governance approaches. In our panel, we aim to reflect upon the question of how ‘foreign accountability’ (Partzsch 2020), ‘corporate accountability’ (e.g. Evans 2019), ‘hardened accountability’ (Moser and Leipold 2019) or the ‘politics of environmental governance’ (Kramarz and Park 2017) can be conceptualized in a way that helps to capture the complex situations in which importing states adopt regulations that target transnational private actors and that impact differently upon producers and local stakeholders, often located in the Global South. How can we conceive of accountability in a situation in which the actors involved in decision making do not represent the same constituency as the actors that are most affected by the regulations?; How can we conceptualize the enforcement dimension of accountability in a way that accounts for both, monitoring and sanctions in importing states and domestic politics and local contexts in the sites of production? and How could power and knowledge be incorporated in conceptualizations of accountability in due diligence regulations?

Empirically, we see that importing states are increasingly adopting due diligence regulations with the aim to protect either the environment (e.g. EU-RED, EUTR, United States 2008 Lacey Act) or human rights (e.g. Dodd-Frank Act, UK and Australian Modern Slavery Act). These regulations refer to different legal bases for holding corporate actors accountable, such as international human rights norms, international law or domestic law. More recently, we observe a trend to increasingly discuss human rights and environmental protection in an integrated manner (e.g. French Duty of Vigilance Law, discussions on the German Lieferkettengesetz and the Swiss Responsible Business Initiative), which can result in more comprehensive regulations of global commodity chains in the future. Our panel asks: What can we learn with regard to differences in regulatory design, implementation and outcomes of these measures? Are there systematic differences in the design and implementation of human rights and environmental due diligence regulations?

In all, this panel seeks to engage scholars of human rights and scholars of environmental governance to enter into a dialogue on the implications and challenges of the recent proliferation of policies aiming to hold corporations accountable for their impacts in producing sites.

References
Bartley T (2014) Transnational Governance and the Re-centered State: Sustainability or Legality? Regulation & Governance 8(1), 93–109.
Eberlein B, Abbott KW, Black J, Meidinger E and Wood S (2014) Transnational business governance interactions: Conceptualization and framework for analysis. Regulation & Governance 8(1), 1-21.
Evans A (2019) Overcoming the global despondency trap: strengthening corporate accountability in supply chains. Review of International Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2019.1679220.
Kramarz T and Park S (2017) Introduction: The politics of environmental accountability. Review of Policy Research 34(1), 4-9.
Moser C, Leipold S (2019) Toward “hardened” accountability? Analyzing the European Union's hybrid transnational governance in timber and biofuel supply chains. Regulation & Governance. https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12268
Partzsch L (2020) Alternatives to Multilateralism: New Forms of Social and Environmental Governance. MIT Press.

We invite scholars of human rights and environmental governance to submit their conceptual and/or empirical contributions on new public policies to regulate global commodity chains. We hope that this call attracts scholars with different backgrounds (political science, law, sociology or anthropology) to discuss the questions formulated in the panel abstract, based on diverse methodological approaches and empirical data. We are interested in single and comparative case studies that present new empirical insights into the unfolding of due diligence regulations in different sectors, places and at various scales. We are equally interested in theoretical and conceptual reflections on accountability in global commodity chains. The two-fold aim of the panel is to (1) to contribute to the development of new conceptual frameworks for assessing hardened foreign accountability in a way that accounts for complex governance structures and actor constellations, and; (2) to improve our empirical understanding on whether and under which conditions new public policies at national or supranational level can lead to hardened accountability.