Shaping Human Rights Due Diligence: Norm Contestation in the Business and Human Rights Regime

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Janne Mende
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 398306144

Human rights due diligence (HRDD) has taken centre stage in recent developments in the business and human rights (BHR) regime, which regulates business activities with regard to human rights. HRDD has gained widespread recognition as a pivotal standard to operationalize the corporate responsibility to respect human rights. Yet what exactly HRDD entails or should entail, and who is responsible for conducting and overseeing it, remains highly contested, as the great variety of actors involved in the BHR regime attach widely varying understandings and expectations to the norm. At the same time, it is through this very contestation that HRDD is given meaning as a norm in the BHR regime. This study investigates the contested processes of meaning-giving and interpretation of HRDD by the wide variety of norm interpreters in the BHR regime, by asking how contestation over divergent expectations and understandings attributed to HRDD shape the norm. Drawing on the theoretical premise that norm contestation is a productive process which is constitutive of norms and their evolution, this project traces the contestation over the meanings of HRDD by mapping the manifold understandings and expectations which norm interpreters in the BHR regime attribute to HRDD. It focuses on four themes of contestation in the deliberations and debates over HRDD: (1) the norm’s soft and hard law dimensions, (2) the attribution of responsibility to regulate and conduct HRDD to public and private actors, (3) the degree of generality vs sectoral and issue-specificity of HRDD, and (4) the relationship between HRDD and legal liability. The project will reconstruct the meanings of HRDD that emerge out of these themes of contestation, and conceptualize different (also contradictory) constellations among these meanings, which help explain how HRDD takes shape in the BHR regime. The project focuses on two case studies which demonstrate the global relevance of the norm, featuring actors from the Global North as well as from the Global South – the EU’s mandatory HRDD initiative, and the negotiations of a treaty on BHR at the UN Human Rights Council. The study employs a two-stage empirical analysis which integrates qualitative content analysis with elements of grounded theory. This analysis is (1) applied to sets of documents produced and submitted as part of the stakeholder consultation processes, and (2) supplemented with in-depth interviews with key actors.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants