In this event, Law researcher Luca Tenreira will discuss his most recent paper, which scrutinises how due diligence operates both as a regulatory discharge to companies and as a mechanism for co-producing regulatory outcomes.
After five years of EU Green Deal-driven legislative efforts on corporate sustainability, key initiatives such as the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D) emerged. With CS3D, due diligence is now legally mandated—yet remains entangled in existing corporate governance norms and techno-scientific practices that allow firms to navigate, reinterpret, and even co-opt regulation to their advantage.
Drawing from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), this paper interrogates due diligence as both a regulatory discharge for firms and a mechanism through which regulatory outcomes are co-produced by corporations, auditors, and industry alliances. The directive’s ambiguous implementation space creates a strategic zone where expertise, legal compliance, and managerial discretion intersect, shaping the governance of socio-environmental impacts in ways that may undermine regulatory intent. Through the lens of an infrastructural cases study—analyzing the governance of a transnational pipeline project, a wind-farm project and a mining project—this paper follows the entanglement of technical assessments, environmental standards, and geopolitical interests in structuring due diligence obligations.
The analysis reveals how legal mandates are mediated by expert knowledge, corporate lobbying, and the discretionary nature of compliance assessments, ultimately questioning whether CS3D will enforce genuine accountability or merely reinforce the recursive failure of EU regulators to enact effective corporate sustainability legislation. Within this paradigm, it seeks to investigate the overall epistemic challenges of framing environmental and social problems through particular indicators, metrics, and processes—highlighting their role in including or excluding certain narratives and stakeholders. By examining material practices and activist interventions, this ethnographic study highlights the normative consequences of such regulation and attempts to thinking the conditions of possibility for governance approaches to incorporate care, decolonial perspectives, and a commitment to place-based justice in shaping global value chains regulation.
Luca Tenreira is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute (EUI), Law Department. He previously studied and is now a research fellow at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS). His academic work focuses on Global Value Chains regulation in the International and EU context with a specific focus on due diligence, blending a deep interest in the knowledge controversies surrounding the implementation of such regulation in an increasingly complex data-driven regulatory framework.
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