As a student in France, Luca Tenreira worked as a research assistant on projects at the intersection of law, sociology of science, and natural sciences, and did not initially imagine himself as a traditional legal scholar. What drew him to law was its internal logic and what happens when it meets the world outside. “I was always interested in the thick description of controversial situations,” he says, “and this involved working with people who are not necessarily researchers in your field or sometimes not researchers at all, such as artivists.”
That instinct eventually led him to step away from European legal texts and into the field. Today, as a PhD researcher at the EUI Department of Law, Luca studies how EU corporate responsibility laws operate along global value chains. But, rather than analysing them only from Brussels, he chose to follow them on the ground, where they are meant to apply.
His research focuses on the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, a 1,443-kilometre infrastructure project linking oil fields in Uganda’s Albertine Region to Tanga district on the Tanzanian coast. The project is presented by its operators as a model of responsible development, supported by extensive social and environmental assessments, compensation plans, and monitoring systems. “For me, the question was not whether these instruments exist,” Luca explains. “They do. The question is to understand why their application is contested but also relied upon by activists, and it means tracing what they actually do when they encounter specific environments and forms of life.”
Over the past decade, as Luca notes, the European Union has built a legal framework requiring companies to take responsibility for harm along their global supply chains. The mechanism is called due diligence. Under EU law, companies now carry three core obligations: identify human rights and environmental risks in their operations, prevent those risks from materialising, and compensate for harm when it occurs.
Luca traces these frameworks back to a series of corporate scandals that exposed the limits of existing law: the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh, the trade in so-called blood diamonds, documented cases of forced labour. Legal tools, in his account, were not equipped to reach the complex, transnational networks where harm was actually occurring.
Due diligence, as Luca sees it, was the EU’s attempt to close that gap. When the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive was finalised, Luca recalls a moment of optimism. “Everyone was so excited,” he says. “It felt like, okay, now the problems are going to be solved.”
To understand what those obligations actually produce, Luca spent extended periods doing fieldwork along the pipeline corridor in Uganda and Tanzania, speaking to affected communities, local scientists, and activists. "On the documents it looks quite convincing," he says, "because they actually put so much effort into paying consultants and creating good data."
His work draws on anthropology, science and technology studies, and legal theory simultaneously, shifting frameworks depending on the site and the controversy at hand. "Because this pipeline is so big," he says, "when you move from one place to another, it is a very specific issue at stake. Different people, different environments, and forms of life." Not every law department would accommodate that approach. At the EUI Department of Law, he found it was encouraged. For a researcher whose questions had always crossed disciplinary lines, that openness made the project possible.
When he travelled along the pipeline route, he moved between villages, NGO offices, government institutions, and scientific offices. He conducted interviews, organised focus groups, observed community meetings, and followed the documents that structure the project: impact assessments, compensation forms, maps, reports.
Fieldwork, he says, changed his understanding of law. “From far away, everything looks quite coherent. But when you go on the ground, it fragments into many different realities. Often the problems reported by transnational activists turn out not to be aligned with grounded perspectives.”
In the coffee-growing regions further along the pipeline, Luca spent time with farming communities whose land had been acquired for construction. Here, compensation was calculated per plant. Each coffee tree was counted, assigned a market value, and paid for accordingly. “But these trees are not just economic units,” Luca explains. “They are part of an entire system, ecological but also social.”
Coffee income, he was told, often pays for school fees or supports extended families. Removing trees and compensating them individually transformed the conditions under which livelihoods were organised. In some cases, farmers were given new seeds to restart cultivation, but these were unsuited to local soils and required fertiliser the farmers had never used, with no training provided.
“It’s these chains of effects that you start to see when you stay there,” Luca says. “Things that are not visible in the documents.”
In Tanzania’s coastal region of Tanga, where the pipeline reaches the ocean, Luca followed another set of transformations. To construct the marine export terminal, sections of mangrove forest were cleared. However, mangroves stabilise coastlines, support fish populations, and protect coral reefs. Through local contacts, Luca met scientists involved in restoration efforts. They explained that while restoration was under way, important elements had been overlooked, including identifying the original species of mangroves before they were removed and using more effective restoration methods. He also met fishing communities affected by restricted access to coastal areas and changing ecological conditions.
“On paper, you have mitigation measures, restoration programmes, livelihood plans,” he says. “But when you spend time there, you see how all these elements are interconnected. What appears in official documentation as separate issues covering environment, biodiversity, and livelihoods, is experienced locally as part of a single system.”
These observations feed directly into his published work. In an article published in the Journal of Environmental Law, he argues that the problem with corporate sustainability claims is no longer a lack of information but its opposite: Companies now produce assessments of such volume and technical complexity that the excess itself becomes, in his view, a form of concealment. A second article, in the Coimbra Journal for Legal Studies, traces how methodological choices about which indicators to include and how to frame community consultation collectively produce the appearance of responsibility without its substance.
For Luca, none of this amounts to a case against corporate responsibility law. "These obligations, to identify, prevent, compensate, they are not wrong in themselves," he says. What his fieldwork shows is that their effectiveness depends on the kinds of knowledge they draw on. Local communities, activists, and scientists often possess detailed understandings of environmental and social dynamics built through long-term engagement.
"That knowledge is there," he says. "The question is whether the system is able to refer to it."
Alongside his doctoral research, Luca is developing Bomba La Mafuta, which means “the oil pipeline” in Kiswahili and Luganda. It is an art and research collaboration with Ugandan artist Kevin Murungi, for which they obtained a residency at 32° East, an art centre based in Kampala. Bomba La Mafuta translates fieldwork into textile practices, treating fabric as a living archive of the experiences gathered along the pipeline. Drawing on testimonies, symbols, and materials collected in Uganda and Tanzania, it explores how extractive processes leave traces that exceed what legal categories can capture. Textile-making becomes, in this context, a way of knowing that engages with the sensory, affective, and symbolic dimensions of harm flattened in technical reports.
“Legal research tends to abstract and leave aside affective dimensions,” Luca reflects. “Bomba La Mafuta will be included in my doctoral work and is a way of archiving, of staying closer to what people and the landscapes actually experience in extractive contexts.”
His research ultimately invites a shift in perspective: from asking whether companies comply with the law, to asking how the law itself defines and organises the problems it seeks to address. Responsibility, he argues, does not simply travel down a supply chain. What matters is what happens to it along the way.
Luca Tenreira is a PhD researcher in the EUI Department of Law. His doctoral thesis, “How to make-up a pipeline? Friction after the turn to supply chains in EU Law”, follows the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, combining legal analysis, ethnography, and critical theory to understand how EU corporate due diligence obligations operate in practice and is supervised by Loïc Azoulai. His research is developed in close collaboration with transnational and local activist networks, legal practitioners, and artists, and engages with case law, grassroots struggles, and experimental law–art practices to rethink extractive governance from situated perspectives. His research was published through articles in the Journal of Environmental Law, The Coimbra Journal for Legal Studies, and as a co-edited EUI Law Working Paper.
Photo by Luca Tenreira: The East African Crude Oil Pipeline corridor under construction.