Mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence is one of the latest, and most promising additions, to the field of corporate sustainability law. The legislation is framed with ambitious objectives: to identify, prevent, and eliminate harm to both the environment and human rights, and to ensure effective remediation for affected individuals.
However, insufficient attention has been paid to how the novel and complex provisions of these laws will be enforced in practice. Enforcement will be the cornerstone to translating legislators’ intentions into real impact. We argue that the success of due diligence depends on a model of ‘decentralised enforcement by design’, which stakeholders should identify and rely on to achieve effective transformation of global value chains.
Human Rights and Environmental Due Diligence Against All Odds
The trend towards due diligence continues despite corporate lobbying and political pressure to dismantle it. Countries such as France, Germany and Norway have adopted mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence statutes, and legislative debates are underway in other jurisdictions including the United Kingdom, South Korea and Thailand. The statutes have significant extraterritorial effects, meaning they impact companies and corporate activities outside the country that enacted them.
In the European Union, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) is a landmark adoption of due diligence. A deregulation process in Europe prompted the adoption of a watered-down version of the directive in March 2026. Even after these substantial reductions, the CSDDD’s key provisions on due diligence remain in place, however. The next step is for them to be transposed into EU Member State domestic law by July 2028, and then for implementation in 2029, at which point enforcement will kick in.
Leveraging the Polycentric Governance of Global Value Chains
Global value chains present a collective action problem. Elinor Ostrom famously challenged the assumption that such problems demand centralised, hierarchical control. Her Nobel-winning work on the commons showed that local communities routinely manage shared resources through polycentric systems: multiple, formally independent decision-making centres that compete, cooperate and learn from each other.
Julia Black’s work on polycentric regulation brings these interdisciplinary insights into the law. Modern regulation, Black argues, is ‘characterised by fragmentation, complexity and interdependence, where both state and non-state actors can be both regulators and the regulated’. All regulatory systems are to some extent polycentric because the law interacts with markets and social norms. Mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence sits at that spectrum’s advanced end because neither the State nor any other entity has absolute capacity to enforce norms across the entire global value chain.
Decentralised Enforcement by Design
Through the lens of this polycentric governance framework, we argue that an overlooked uniqueness of due diligence is that it puts forward what we call ‘decentralised enforcement by design’. Mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence does not simply ignore polycentric governance of global value chains as an inescapable, non-legal reality. Instead, its novelty lies in deliberately leveraging and coordinating both public and private actors which can enforce due diligence.
The CSDDD, as a milestone law on human rights and environmental due diligence, operationalises this architecture by distributing enforcement opportunities across buyers, suppliers, local communities, supervisory authorities and courts.
Key Players for Enforcement of Due Diligence
Buyers, and especially lead companies under the scope of the CSDDD, are expected to press for compliance across the global value chain through the ‘appropriate measures’ required in the directive. They should enforce the CSDDD mainly through contracts, corporate policies and collaborative measures, and under the duties to provide remediation and grievance mechanisms.
Suppliers, until now underestimated, can play an essential role. The CSDDD does not simply require buyers to issue flow-down clauses of their regulatory requirements. Instead, it requires buyers to collaborate and even invest in suppliers to help them achieve sustainable conditions of production. Suppliers can therefore request that buyers collaborate in this way, arguing that otherwise the buyers will be breaching the CSDDD. Suppliers could push for enforcement of the CSDDD by threatening to report noncompliance to the regulatory authority overseeing the buyer. They could also include or reinterpret express or implied terms in their contracts with buyers such as investment duties and responsible contracting terms, and invoke due diligence collaboration duties as a defence if a buyer attempts to terminate the contract.
Local communities affected by the unsustainable practices also hold enforcement leverage. The CSDDD grants them meaningful consultation rights throughout the due diligence process, access to corporate grievance and notification mechanisms, the right to submit substantiated concerns to supervisory authorities, and limited but still existing opportunities to bring civil liability claims.
Supervisory authorities are a crucial actor. They carry out their own enforcement actions, and they also set the tone for the level of enforcement expected from private actors across the global value chain. A related problem in this area is that current due diligence laws in Europe tend to place their trust in commercial or corporate watchdogs to the detriment of supervisors with a human rights or environmental background. Germany and Netherlands entrust enforcement to their administrative authorities specialised in economic affairs and markets supervision, Norway to their consumer authority, and France recently on a commercial court specialised on environmental claims. Corporate watchdogs might have a less interventionist approach and less expertise on human rights and the environment. Supervisory authorities should have the right expertise and policy priorities, and have enough resources, powers and independence to act in global value chains.
We envisage that courts might have a less prominent role in terms of direct actions from victims. The amendments to Article 29 of the CSDDD after the Omnibus left jurisdictional, standing and evidentiary barriers for victims. Yet the possibility for civil liability under the CSDDD remains and courts could progressively change their stances. France is currently the leading jurisdiction on due diligence tort claims. There, we observe that France concentrated enforcement powers in commercial courts rather than in other areas (such as environmental courts), but eventually designated a single commercial court with expertise in corporate sustainability to avoid the biases and shortfalls described. Under this model, victims are obtaining their first successes on the merits, such as in the recent Yves Rocher judgment. In any event, beyond these direct claims, courts will exercise influence in this decentralised enforcement model. They will be the ultimate interpreters of due diligence as decisions from supervisory authorities are appealed to the courts.
The Whole is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts
No single node of this system will have sufficient enforcement powers to bring sustainability to global value chains. In contrast, a plurality of actors might enhance the opportunities for transformation. Mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence deliberately relies on this ‘decentralised enforcement by design’. While imperfect, having a mix of public and private actors policing global value chains might overcome jurisdictional barriers to State action and pragmatically advance corporate sustainability.
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This blog post is based on the paper to be presented at the conference Sustainability Law: Law’s Response to the Convergence of Crises, 16-18 September 2026, at the University of Oslo
