P056 - Is there a legal regime enabling global ‘corporate knowledge’ for restorative justice? A study on standards within mineral supply chains.

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Abstract

This research explores the expansion of restorative justice (RJ) principles to redress environmental unlawful harm caused by EU transnational companies’ suppliers in the Global South.
The opportunity to discuss RJ remedial solutions is offered by the EU efforts to address environmental and social harms that necessarily stem from the extractive logics underpinning the Green Deal’s transition towards low carbon economies. These harms especially concern local communities affected by corporate colonial-like exploitation of natural resources in the Global South. Exemplificative in this sense is the long negotiated CSDD Proposal, which establishes obligations upon EU companies to redress harms caused by their suppliers throughout Global Value Chains (GVC).
Integrating these obligations with RJ-oriented solutions poses a problem of ‘corporate knowledge’. Precisely, it requires investigating channels of corporate knowledge creation and transmission to enable RJ approaches throughout GVC, i.e. outside the spatial dimension of physical contiguity between the corporate harm-doer and affected local realities.
To this end, and narrowing the scope on mineral supply chains, the investigation explores whether due-diligence legal information tools, e.g. standards, adopted at the EU level to build and transmit EU companies’ global knowledge of the adverse unlawful impacts of their suppliers in GVC, could serve the operationalization of inclusive restorative remedial solutions. Focus is given to relevant standard-setting frames for mineral supply chains such as the OECD and the IRMA ones. By taking a southern green criminological perspective, this socio-legal analysis investigates the permeability of these frames to affected communities’ voices when referring to historically loaded and culturally and geographically sensitive concepts, such as ‘community members’, ‘livelihood’, ‘landscape’, ‘land use’, and property-related ones, including ‘site ownership’ and ‘boundaries’. In doing so, it fills the gap represented by the minor attention paid to remedial actions, so far flattened on Westernized notions of ‘impacts’ and ‘remediation’.

Author

• Stefano Porfido, Roma Tre University