Transnational Corporations and the Shifting Boundaries of Justice

Project Information

TRANSCORP

Grant agreement ID: 890677

DOI

10.3030/890677

Project closed

EC signature date 20 April 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 31 December 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 184 707,84

EU contribution

€ 184 707,84

Coordinated by

FONDATION NATIONALE DES SCIENCES POLITIQUES
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TRANSCORP (Transnational Corporations and the Shifting Boundaries of Justice)

Reporting period: 2021-01-01 to 2022-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

>Launched in January 2021, TRANSCORP aimed to advance the understanding of the changing interface between business and society by analyzing the judicialisation of corporate social responsibility (CSR). At the time, this phenomenon was already increasingly observed in the European Union, and notably in France, where the adoption of the duty of vigilance law had opened the prospect that transnational corporations could be sued by third-parties for not taking sufficiently into account the risks generated by industrial activities across their production chains.
> While CSR had long been considered a matter of voluntary issue for private businesses, the on-going hardening of soft law remained an under-researched topic. This project aimed to address this gap, by exploring how the agencies of a variety of state and non-state actors – such as transnational corporations (TNCs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), supranational institutions (EU, OECD) – intersect at different levels in the production of transnational legal cases that encapsulate competing claims for justice.
> The overall objective of TRANSCORP was to investigate this ‘judicialisation turn’ as mirroring the overarching institutional significance that TNCs have acquired in the world power system. It intended to do so through the development of a longitudinal case study, focused on a legal action mobilizing the French duty of vigilance law.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

> Between january 2021 and december 2022, I have developed an ambitious case study of the legal action launched in 2020 by a coalition of NGOs against the multinational retail group Casino, on the grounds that the beef purchase policy of its Brazilian subsidiary contributes to intensifying deforestation in the Amazon. In recent years, Brazilian corporate giants of the meatpacking industry (i.e. direct suppliers of Casino's supermarkets in Brazil) have been indeed blamed for their for their unwillingness to identify and blacklist suppliers who engage in illegal deforestation practices. Suspected of endorsing this status quo - and thus, of breaching its duty of vigilance, Casino's mother company got sued before French courts.
> In order to trace the multiple ramifications of this unprecedented (and still ongoing) legal action, I decided to learn Portuguese from scratch, and to prepare a three-month fieldwork in remote rural areas of northern Mato Grosso. Once arrived there, I developed an ethnographic observation of the everyday activities that undergird the "cattle chain" - the source of all problems in Casino's case. I spent time with farmers, animal traders, technical counsellors, buyers from slaughterhouses, and documented their imaginaries of economic prosperity and environmental transformation. In the meantime, I reached out (virtually) to a great number of Brazilian scientists and experts (most of them based in Brasilia, Sao Paulo, or Rio), in order to understand better the legal and technical challenges linked with the construction of environemental traceability in the cattle chain. Once back in France, I prepared a memorandum of agreement with the coalition of NGOs, in order to participate to their internal meetings, to organize semi-structured interviews with their staff, and to get access to confidential working documents. Under the umbrella of this agreement, I also reached out with lawyers and legal experts in order to contextualize better the ins and outs of the lawsuit, and to get more information on the technicalities of the legal procedure.
> So far, TRANSCORP has already yielded scientific results: in 2021 and 2022, I presented my working hypothesis in four international conferences and research seminars. After having gathered a significant amount of empirical material (incl. from the Brazilian fieldwork) in 2021, I have engaged early 2022 into the writing of three scientific paper, which will be submitted to academic journals in the coming year 2023. In parallel to this, I have also mobilized my empirical material in teaching sessions, thus disseminating early research results to student audiences.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The papers that I am currently preparing will enrich ongoing scientific debates in three fields:
- Economic sociology: In this paper, I look at how French NGOs strategically use the duty of vigilance law in order to intensify moral struggles in the markets, in order to render visible distant harms (re)produced by global values chains. I suggest that in the Casino case, the mobilization of civil society has paradoxical effects: it accelerates the construction of "environmental performance" as a source of value - and therefore, of differentiation - for actors in the Brazilian cattle chain, hence reinforcing the risk of a two-tier market - with "deforestation beef" being exclusively exported to developing countries.
- Legal sociology: In this paper, I scrutinize the proof-making activities in which claimants engage in order to give material evidence of Casino’s lack of vigilance in Brazil, and show that a rigorous cross-cutting of various data sets (satellite image banks, land registers, animal health forms) is required to produce this evidence. This paper sheds light on the challenges linked with the production of environmental expertise in transnational legal conflicts.
- History of science: In this paper - which is a collaboration with my supervisor, Martin Giraudeau -, I compare contemporary activities of proof-making with those documented by Bruno Latour in a paper that he wrote after making a field trip in the Brazilian Amazon with French soil scientists, in 1993. I contextualize Latour's article, by using his unpublished field notes and conducting interviews with those who made this trip with him. I compare their modes of describing the transformations with those displayed by civil society actors involved in the Casino lawsuit.
On the medium/long term, more publications will come out (others are in the pipe): the research developed in TRANSCORP will offer valuable insight to all debates relating to the elaboration of legal mechanisms that aim to reinforce CSR.

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