The French ‘duty of care’ in the courtroom:Exploring the double movement at work in the contested governance of global value chains (GVCs)

The recent wave of mandatory due diligence legislations in Northern countries has opened new spaces of interaction between civil society groups and large corporations around the stakes of corporate accountability for social and environmental conditions in global value chains (GVCs). The emergence and early forms of manifestation of these legal initiatives have been analyzed as political processes shaped by power relations between civil society and corporate actors over the ways in which corporate accountability should be defined, controlled, and exercised in GVCs. Nevertheless, these political readings mostly left unaddressed the deeper stakes involved in the discursive struggles over what the ‘duty of care' of enterprises should mean and how it is to be exercised. The paper addresses this question by adopting a critical Polanyian perspective on the double movement at work in the contested governance of GVCs, to highlight the noncommensurability of the purposes, values and means of action being defended by market forces and civil society movements in the due diligence battle. With a focus on Total Uganda, the first court case of significance to be ruled on under the French 2017 law on the ‘duty of vigilance' of multinationals, the paper highlights how the Polanyian double movement operates in the courtroom: while the market logic seeks to subsume the duty of care into a negotiable and standardizable construct, the counter-movements aim to see the duty of care enforced in a substantive meaning, to provide effective protection for the living conditions of people and nature being affected by the market economics project of the GVC. The Polanyian perspective further helps to situate the case in a broader double movement encompassing both the earlier elaboration of the French law and the larger scales of international jurisdictions, transnational campaigns and interlinked corporate entities involved in and around this legal battle.