What Is Corporate-Speak for Planetary Survival? – Communicating ”Physical Environment” through Corporate Due Diligence Laws

Concepts such as the Anthropocene, or Planetary Boundaries, have been engaged to mobilize knowledge on the degradation and exhaustion of the physical environment produced by the scientific system as visible (and especially, actionable) risks in other social systems (Ellis, 2020). Taking Niklas Luhmann’s (1986) descriptions of the complexity of communicating about the physical environment in other social systems as a point of departure, the Anthropocene can be described as an attempt by society of understanding the physical environment in such a way to make it more apt to cause resonance towards other social systems.

When it comes to establishing normative expectations on environmental protections in the legal system, this already highly complex and difficult endeavour might have their impact limited by multi-national companies and wide global value chains (GVCs), which are both pointed out as having the potential to incur enormous amounts of harm, and possessing legal forms that are able to evade the legal scrutiny from states. In order to address this gap and increase the resonance both domestic, regional and international regulation has turned to the language of Corporate Due Diligence in order to make global value chain visible, and thereby subjected to jurisdiction, even if extra-territorially. But how well do the concepts communicate and travel through the articulation of the problem and the legal shape of addressing it?.

In this paper, I investigate how the environmental urgencies and limits imposed by the the physical environment are perceived and communicated about in attempts at regulating global value chains through corporate due-diligence laws. Through the use of legal analysis, and complemented with preliminary results of ethnographic fieldwork in Professional Trade Fairs, I highlight the ways in which the cognitive expectations of the Anthropocene regarding the physical environment appear (or disappear) in contemporary GVC regulations.