The problematization and regulation of responsibility in transnational supply chains: public discourse, private governance and state intervention in Germany and Switzerland

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With a focus on Germany and Switzerland, the research project aims to investigate how questions of corporate social responsibility in transnational supply chains are publicly discussed, politically answered and legally decided in the form of concrete regulatory projects. Multinational companies exploit inequalities in wages as well as in labour and environmental standards along global supply chains and production networks to gain comparative cost advantages. Despite international conventions, there are hardly any globally binding standards. In the context of public problematisation of grievances and accidents, there is an increasing discussion as to the extent to which transnational supply chains should be regulated by national laws in the countries of origin of multinational companies. In recent years, concrete legislative initiatives to regulate transnational supply chains have been discussed or have already been politically decided in numerous countries, namely in Germany and Switzerland. This means that the legal responsibility dimension, which had initially received only limited attention in scholarship on corporate social responsibility, is thus gaining in importance.Against this backdrop, we investigate how public problem articulation and institutional problem management intertwine and how problematisation and negotiation processes in the political public sphere, in policy processes and in court contribute to a (normative) regulatory framework for transnational value chains. For this purpose, the argumentative positioning in public discourses will be reconstructed and related to the development in politics and law in Germany and Switzerland. The research project thus combines sociological, political and legal perspectives, approaches and methods in a cross-national comparative research design. The empirical investigation is based on a comparison of the regulation of transnational supply chains in Germany and Switzerland in the context of European and international law. In a further step, a discourse network analysis of actors and arguments in the debate on transnational supply chains in both countries is conducted. This will shed light on the changing issues, attributions of responsibility and actor constellations in the political public sphere. Finally, this will be complemented by the legal perspective, in which on the one hand a case law analysis and on the other hand a dogmatic and comparative law analysis of the liability conditions of multinational corporations will be conducted. The combination of the different theoretical and methodological approaches opens up the possibility of examining the problematisation and regulation of responsibility in transnational supply chains and thereby gaining new insights into the interplay of discursive and legal dimensions of corporate responsibility.