📝Une perspective anthropologique sur les pratiques de responsabilité des entreprises dans les chaînes de valeur mondiales (An Anthropological Perspective on Corporate Responsibility Practices in Global Value Chains), in 📰Revue internationale de droit économique, 2021, vol. XXXV, no. 4

► Full reference: L. Knöpfel, « Une perspective anthropologique sur les pratiques de responsabilité des entreprises dans les chaînes de valeur mondiales » (An Anthropological Perspective on Corporate Responsibility Practices in Global Value Chains), Revue internationale de droit économique, 2021/4, vol. XXXV, pp. 45-67.

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► Summary: the author adopts a legal anthropology perspective on the governance of mining companies in global value chains, taking the reader into the relationships between a primary-sector company and local communities at the “resource frontier” in El Cesar, northern Colombia. After a methodological intervention on research into responsibility in value chains, she studies a particular corporate responsibility practice, social programmes, through corporate gifts and the social licence to operate, relations of dependence and detachment between the company and the communities, and the compensatory function of these programmes.

She argues that social programmes sustain a cycle of reciprocity through which the company forges close and entangled relationships with the communities and assumes far-reaching responsibilities for their economic and social well-being. This understanding finds a legal counterpart in contractual obligations and third-party beneficiary rights: contract law could and should therefore play a central role in regulating global value chains, in the primary sector and beyond.

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🦉 The article is available in full text to those registered in Professor Marie-Anne Frison-Roche’s courses.