Tackling the social and environmental challenges of Global Value Chains: is reterritorialization a relevant option for GVC-based activism?

The shortcomings of global value chains have gained growing visibility in public spheres during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the vulnerability of transnational production systems to unexpected shocks, raising poverty levels in export-based producing countries, or the links between deforestation, declining biodiversity and human disease pandemics, stirring debates over the merits and limitations of reshoring and alternative local chains. Social inequalities, precarious development and ecological destruction have been longstanding issues surrounding the rise of global value chains (GVCs), however, and they have stirred the growth of new forms of ‘GVC-based activism' (Palpacuer, 2019) since the 1990s. Transnational networks of civil society resistance have set to reestablish a ‘chain of responsibility' (Baraud de Lagerie, 2016) in GVCs by making visible the widespread social and environmental abuses occurring ‘upstream' the chains in the Global South, and by linking them to the lead firms in charge of design and marketing activities in Western countries. Faced with the limitations of corporate responses in the form of CSR and multi-stakeholder initiatives, many activist groups have engaged in promoting binding forms of regulation, via contractual agreements such as the 2013 Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, or new legislation such as the 2017 French law on the Duty of Vigilance of Multinationals. Some movements have also been calling on governments to promote more sustainable, localized value chains, particularly in agrifood, to reduce the environmental damages and the eviction of people relying on more traditional forms of subsistence that GVC-based production entails in far-flung supplying countries. Taking stock of these varied forms of GVC-based activism, this research aims to explore to which extend GVC activists are now considering reterritorialization as a relevant option for tackling the challenges of social and environmental sustainability in value chains, and how such option might be incorporated in their strategic agenda. We draw on an on-going action research with a collective of civil society organizations involved in – predominantly global, but also local – value chains, aiming to feed the reflection of the collective on the topic of reterritorializing value chains. Building on interviews with members of the collective as well as collective sessions, we identify a variety of options considered by coalitions involved in diverse industries/chains, the distinct forms that reterritorialization may take for these collectives as well as obstacles and limitations tied to this strategic option.