As demands for “ethical trade” have become more prevalent in the Global North, foreign corporate accountability is increasingly seen as a key to enforcing labor rights and environmental protection in the upstream part of global supply chains. To recall, in this special issue (SI) “foreign corporate accountability” denotes the accountability of companies for negative impacts caused abroad by their subsidiaries or suppliers. In today's interdependent, digitalized world disasters, such as the collapse in 2013 of the Rana Plaza garment factory building in Bangladesh and the breaches in 2015 and 2019 of the Mariana and Brumadinho tailings dams in Brazil, have both made harms more widely visible and also heightened concerns in consuming (importing) countries about socio-economic and environmental conditions at production sites (Kramarz, 2022). The contributions to this Special Issue (SI) examine a variety of regulatory practices that seek, however incompletely, a hardening of foreign corporate accountability (Berning & Sotirov, 2023; Schilling-Vacaflor & Lenschow, 2021); that is, the institutionalization, legal codification and effective implementation of supply chain regulations.
The devil is in the detail—The need for a decolonizing turn and better environmental accountability in global supply chain regulations: A comment