Campaigning for Greater Accountability in Global Supply Chains

Abstract

Several supply chain-related laws have recently been passed in Europe and the United States as a result of successful NGO campaigns, which have addressed the challenges of accountability in a globalized world. Based on the analysis of campaign documents and semi-structured interviews, the article examines the accountability narratives used by NGOs in recent campaigns for an EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). The results show that the campaigns portray European corporations as perpetrators, people in producing countries as mere victims, and NGOs as heroic liberators. NGOs reproduce postcolonial trajectories by advocating a supply chain law in the Global North as the central solution to problems in the Global South. While rescue politics is thus the defining feature of NGO campaigns, there is no evidence of the strategic use of pseudo-causal narratives that are empirically inaccurate.