Is the EU’s turn to sustainable supply chains neo-colonialist?

• Department of Law

This session of the Law Department Faculty Seminar Series will feature a discussion by EUI Professors Joanne Scott and Claire Kilpatrick.

During modern European colonialism, the intensive extraction of natural resource caused egregious environmental and human impacts. However, environmental conservation was also a key feature of this period, due in part to concerns about continuity of supply. Such conservation was frequently exclusionary in nature, depriving local communities and indigenous peoples of access to their lands for livelihood and subsistence purposes. The availability of natural resources from the colonies generated considerable wealth for colonial powers, feeding processes of industrialisation and technological change.

Turning to a recently enacted set of EU sustainable supply-chain instruments, we ask whether these are neo-colonial in nature. In the main, these measures do not seek to reduce EU consumption of natural resources or EU dependence on imports of these. The strength of their commitment to environmental protection is varied, driven, at least in part, by EU strategic interests. The measures are insufficiently attentive to negative social consequences of resource extraction and they show limited awareness of the risk of exclusionary conservation. They are, moreover, largely agnostic as to the distribution of economic value added as between the EU and third countries and do little to mitigate ecologically unequal exchange.