During the first 30 months, the team members focused their research on transnational mobilizations – and subsequent corporate accountability strategies - of civil society organizations (CSOs), including global networks and national CSOs from Global South countries. We consulted archives and libraries and conducted interviews in Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, and South Africa. We directly observed UN forums and and events organized by CSOs and business organizations. Through critical discourse analysis of different documents and interviews, we grasped a variety of approaches towards corporate accountability, identified relations of both cooperation and competition between different CSOs, and critically assessed power asymmetries between CSOs from the Global North and the Global South. This research resulted in the volume Raluca Grosescu & John Dale (eds.), Re-Envisioning Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Abuses: Civil Society and Transnational Action (Springer, forthcoming 2025) where the team members contributed five chapters, the introduction and the conclusion. We also worked on a collective article on different ideological approaches to corporate accountability, to be submitted for review in 2024. The team created the “Civil Society Active in Corporate Accountability Dataset,” which provides the first quantitative information on a global sample of 290 CSOs engaged in corporate accountability, including the organizations’ structures, aims, repertoires of actions, and funding. The dataset is freely available on Mendeley Data (1) 2024. Two articles interpreting the dataset are currently under review. The team organized its first major conference: twelve selected contributions on civil society, corporate accountability and transnational action will be published in the above-mentioned edited volume co-edited by the PI. We also organized three intersectoral workshops with over 100 human rights activists, judicial officials, and academics, to discuss obstacles and opportunities to advance corporate accountability. They resulted in the first guidelines for corporate accountability in Latin America, drafted in collaboration with Andhes Argentina, Oxford University, and prosecutors from the Southern Cone (forthcoming 2024) & a special issue on corporate accountability, cartographies and photographs, to be published in 2025, in collaboration with FLACSO Argentina. Moreover, we participated with 22 individual presentations at different conferences.
