Global Value Chains as Regulatory Proxy: Transnationalising the Internal Market Through EU Law

Global value chains (GVCs) channel commodities, knowledge and capital, but also regulation. By placing obligations on lead firms to be complied with across the value chain, rule-setters can regulate transnational production entities, GVCs, by proxy. In doing so, they overcome the territorial limits of their regulatory capacity. Regulators make extensive use of this possibility in the latest generation of transnational sustainability laws adopted in the Global North. In this chapter, we chart the extension of governance through GVCs, detail how such governance is increasingly the focus of explicit regulatory activity, and discuss what this means for the political economy of transnational production. In particular, we undertake a functional comparison of the justifications for and mechanisms deployed in European Union (EU) regulations adopting an explicit value chain perspective, such as the EU Conflict Minerals Regulation, and propose a novel typology for conceptualising the transnational extension of EU law and the internal market along GVCs.