Many vigilance laws have been designed to prevent and mitigate the impacts of Global Value Chains (GVCs) on human rights and the environment. The article situates these laws within the corporate liability regimes that exist for GVCs. The article argues that vigilance laws remain ambiguous regarding the obligations of powerful actors involved in GVCs, insofar as they often rely on conventional corporate liability regimes. Drawing on insights from responsibility and moral philosophy theories, the article proposes to reconceptualise ‘vigilance’ as an ‘intentional-epistemic’ type of responsibility, in which actors are held responsible based on their intention to know. Building on this, the legal duty of vigilance could be defined as the duty for powerful GVC actors to seek to know potential and actual impacts of the value chains they are involved in. The article closes by examining how this reconceptualisation might be operationalised and the challenges it raises.
Lasselin et al. (Wed,) studied this question.