Project overview - Franca Bülow

Project info

My postdoctoral project examines the effects and implications of recent due diligence legislation—in particular, the EU Directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence (CS3D)—on the governance of global value chains (GVCs), with a focus on sustainability. In a systematic study, my colleagues and I are gathering new empirical evidence on how such laws shape public and corporate governance structures and assessing their effectiveness along supply chains.

To complement this study, I am planning workshops in which stakeholders will jointly present their perceptions of the links between regulation and sustainability impacts and develop future scenarios for their companies. The findings will be supplemented by follow-up surveys and will serve to verify the perceptions of relevant stakeholders regarding the impact of due diligence regulations.

Together with colleagues from the cluster, I want to conduct a framing and discourse analysis of national-level implementation processes. This component analyses how different narratives construct the legitimacy and effectiveness of due diligence laws, examining tensions such as fragmented regulatory environments, competing interests, and variable capacities for compliance. Source materials include legal texts, corporate disclosures, stakeholder commentaries, and media publications.

Planned outputs of my postdoc include a conceptual paper that rethinks legitimacy in transnational supply chain governance, drawing on debates about state sovereignty and civil society influence, and a policy analysis that examines how mHREDD interacts with existing legal frameworks and how it has the potential to promote policy harmonization across different jurisdictions.

By integrating systematic evidence, stakeholder perspectives, and conceptual analysis, the project contributes to a deeper understanding of the regulatory, political, and institutional dynamics shaping sustainability governance in global supply chains.

Why does this research matter?

As global value chains (GVCs) become increasingly central to the world economy, regulatory efforts such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D) aim to make transnational production more sustainable, equitable, and accountable. However, there is still limited understanding of how such legislation affects governance structures, power relations, and socio-ecological outcomes in practice. This project addresses that gap by evaluating both the intended and unintended consequences of due diligence laws across different contexts and sectors. By combining empirical evidence, stakeholder perspectives, and conceptual inquiry, the project seeks to inform more effective, inclusive, and legitimate approaches to global sustainability governance.

Key Objectives

Synthesize evidence on the governance effects of EU due diligence laws through a systematic review.

Engage stakeholders in participatory systems thinking to map perceived causal linkages between regulation and impact.

Compare national implementation through discourse and framing analyses to identify diverging interpretations and legitimacy claims.

Develop conceptual insights on the relationship between legitimacy, effectiveness, and transnational sovereignty in GVC governance.

Analyse policy interactions and the potential for regulatory diffusion and harmonisation within and beyond the EU.

Contribute to scholarly and policy debates on how to design and implement due diligence regimes that are both effective and just

Collaborations

I am currently working closely with my colleagues from cluster 1 on governance and the effects of due diligence laws on sustainability and human rights as well as on sovereignty. I have also stared to conceptualise work with colleagues from cluster 2, where we want to use AI and text analyses to study sustainability reporting.

Do you have any preliminary findings you want to share?

We are in the process of conducting a case survey analysis, where we assess academic publications on effects of due diligence laws with a specific focus on governance and implications on sustainability and human rights. This birds eye perspective, which is very much still work in progress, provides us with a glimpse into the accumulated knowledge (at least in the research space). Literature appears to cluster around (a) legal implementation in the Global North and (b) corporate implementation and impact in the Global North, hence little is known about (a) administrative implementation processes & legal enforcement and (b) impacts in Global South.