Supply Chain Governance at a Distance - Faculty Colloquium with Professor Galit Sarfaty

Event Description:

This article examines the role of industry in implementing and interpreting the international legal norm of human rights due diligence. Our study focuses on a multi-industry association called the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI), which has assumed a leading role in implementing conflict minerals legislation and interpreting the norm of human rights due diligence in mineral supply chains. Drawing on interviews with RMI staff, corporate representatives, and independent members of the RMI’s governance committees, we analyze the RMI’s risk assessment tools that facilitate corporate compliance with global mineral supply chain regulations. We demonstrate that these technocratic tools mask the underlying corporate interests that control how human rights due diligence is being interpreted and implemented on the ground. We then argue that global supply chains are being “governed at a distance” through these technical practices whereby companies divest themselves of responsibility to their suppliers. Supply chain governance at a distance is therefore transforming the norm of human rights due diligence from an instrument of corporate accountability to a tool of corporate legitimacy.

Please contact the Events Manager Michelle Burchill at burchill@allard.ubc.ca if you would like the Zoom link. 

Speaker:

Galit A. Sarfaty holds a Canada Research Chair in Global Economic Governance and is an Associate Professor with tenure at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and an A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard University.

As a legal scholar and anthropologist, Professor Sarfaty analyzes the ways in which law and legal institutions operate in practice, including the transnational regulation of corporate human rights compliance in global supply chains, the role of corporate actors in international lawmaking, the culture of international organizations, and the use of quantitative regulatory tools in global economic governance.