Summary

In this journal article, Maria-Therese Gustafsson from Stockholm University and Almut Schilling-Vacaflor study human rights and environmental integration in the sustainability governance of global supply chains.

The article analyses the close inter-linkages between deforestation and land tenure in Brazil. The authors show how hybrid, public and private policy instruments have insufficiently accounted for this nexus in Brazil’s soy sector. The article is published in the scientific journal Environmental Science & Policy.

Environmental and human rights consideration

In contemporary discourse, the need to address urgent environmental issues with a social perspective is widely acknowledged. While theories on policy integration have primarily focused on the national scale, limited attention has been given to the merging of environmental and human rights considerations in global supply chain sustainability governance.

In Brazil, domestic legislation has created incentives for land appropriation through deforestation. Consequently, conservation efforts have contributed to practices of ‘green grabbing’, resulting in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, traditional communities and family farmers from their lands.

Key messages

• We analyze how the policy instruments unfold in such complex contexts and argue that the weak integration of land tenure in these instruments tends to undermine both the protection of forests and human rights.
• Our analysis showed that the policy instruments in place for governing Brazil’s soy supply chain have had serious limitations in relation to Human Rights and Environmental Integration (HREI).
• Activists and grassroots organizations from Brazil have, however, actively challenged such siloed approaches, and demanded a better integration of land tenure rights in the analyzed policy instruments.
• Our research highlights that, although global supply chain instruments may not entirely compensate for the deficiencies of domestic policies, they should, at the very least, strive to comprehensively address complex sustainability problems and prevent actions that could worsen existing issues or give rise to new sustainability problems.

Conclusion

In conclusion, our study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the opportunities and structural constraints associated with integrated approaches to interconnected human rights and environmental issues.

Citation

Almut Schilling-Vacaflor, A., Gustafsson, M-T. (2024). Integrating human rights in the sustainability governance of global supply chains: Exploring the deforestation-land tenure nexus, Environmental Science & Policy, Volume 154, 2024.
ISSN 1462-9011, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2024.103690.