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Project

DRIVING CHANGE: Putting small-scale producers in the driver's seat of battery-mineral supply chain regulation.

Western companies that source minerals for electric-vehicle batteries have increasingly been tasked with doing the due diligence of verifying and remedying human rights, social, and environmental abuses in their supply chains. This increased responsibility has gone hand in hand with growing involvement and power of corporate and other non-state actors in transnational regulation. Yet the speed with which new regulatory initiatives are being rolled out means that the meaningful participation of communities and small-scale producers in decision-making around supply-chain initiatives lags behind in both policy and research. This oversight, combined with insufficient consideration of competing normative and knowledge systems and of structural power relations within and beyond mineral supply chains, means that due-diligence initiatives will struggle to create meaningful change on the ground. By bringing together the literature on transnational non-state regulation and critical work on participation, this project aims to develop a framework for putting small-scale producers in the driver's seat, including when it comes to digital technologies. This empirically rich project will collect data in the Democratic Republic of Congo through a novel mix of participatory research methods. By combining theoretical and methodological innovation this study advances the debate on non-state regulation and (digital) participation.
Date:1 Jan 2022 →  Today
Keywords:PARTICIPATION, SUPPLY CHAINS, MINERALS
Disciplines:Anthropology of economy and development, Postcolonial studies, Development studies, Globalisation, Multilevel governance not elsewhere classified