Recent Nordic Trends in Developing Value Chain Sustainability

Abstract

<p>Over the last few decades, global value chains have become the dominant form of economic production. Law has been slow to respond to this change. We have only recently begun to comprehend and regulate global value chains organized as corporate groups and the recent move towards contractually organized value chains pushes law even further away from its comfort zone. In particular, the current state-of-the-art of value chain regulation cannot effectively tackle issues of sustainability in contractually organized value chains. At the same time, several global trends related to private governance, private law litigation and public regulation are driving the development of sustainable value chain governance and developing law’s responses to contractually organized production. In this paper, I look at recent Nordic versions of these global development trends under private governance, private law litigation and public regulation and set them in the global context that they aim to regulate. While on the outset it seems that the Nordic approach tries to go beyond the global state-of-the-art, a key challenge remains in how the local economic interests that are an important driver of Nordic approaches to sustainability are balanced with a more global perspective on sustainability. </p>