From Soft Law to Hard Law

The Developing Legal Regulation of CSR in Global Supply Chains

• Dr. Andreas Rühmkorf

For long, the promotion of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in global supply chains has faced two significant obstacles: First, CSR was considered to be voluntary and thus confined to soft law regulation. Second, theories of supply chain governance focussed on economic upgrading, but did not really include either CSR or public governance (i.e. state regulation). Lately, the situation has somewhat changed. Whilst there has been an increasing realisation that CSR has, in fact, several legal aspects, scholars have also started to appreciate that both state (hard) law and CSR play an important part for the governance of global supply chains.
This chapter will review the developing legal regulation of CSR in global supply chains. This regulation is primarily enacted by the so-called home states of multinational enterprises, i.e. the countries where those corporations are incorporated. The chapter will assess different pieces of legislation that some of those home states have passed in recent years. It will be shown that the move from soft law to hard law in the regulation of CSR in global supply chains is full underway, albeit in very different ways, ranging from transparency laws to corporate criminal liability.
The chapter will be structured in the following way: It will first briefly review the role of CSR in supply chain governance in interdisciplinary literature in management, law and political sciences. This will be followed by a critical assessment of four different recent examples of home state legislation on CSR in global supply chains: The UK’s transparency in supply chains clause, the UK’s national implementation of the EU Directive on nonfinancial information disclosure, the French devoir de vigilance law and the UK Bribery Act. These laws are representative of different regulatory techniques and the different CSR issues that have been legislated so far. Following this assessment, the chapter will discuss this legislative trend and the likely future development.

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