Is the EU’s Turn to Sustainable Supply Chains Neo-Colonialist?
- Date
- 1 December 2025
- Time
- 15:30
- Location
- Roeterseilandcampus - building A
- Room
- A3.01
About the lecture
Our analysis investigates the EU’s new family of sustainable supply-chain instruments by analysing their neo-colonial nature when juxtaposed with modern European colonialism. During modern European colonialism, the intensive extraction of natural resources caused egregious human and environmental impacts. However, environmental conservation was also a key feature of this period, due in part to concerns about security of supply. Such conservation was frequently exclusionary in nature, depriving local communities and Indigenous peoples of access to land for livelihood and subsistence purposes. The colonial powers not only extracted commodities from the colonies but also amassed considerable wealth.
Turning to the EU’s new family of sustainable supply-chain instruments, we ask whether these are neo-colonial in nature. In the main, these measures do not seek to reduce EU consumption of natural resources or EU dependence on imports of these. The measures are insufficiently attentive to negative social consequences of resource extraction and they show limited awareness of the risk of exclusionary conservation. Further, the strength of their commitment to environmental protection is varied, driven, at least in part, by EU strategic interests. They are largely agnostic as to the distribution of economic value added as between the EU and third countries and do little to mitigate ecologically unequal exchange.
About the speakers
Joanne Scott is Professor of European Law at the European University Institute in Florence and co-director of the Academy of European Law. She is Honorary Professor at UCL where she taught previously for many years.
Claire Kilpatrick is a British Academy Global Professor at Queen’s University Belfast and a Senior Fellow at the EUI. From 2011-2025 she was a Professor at the EUI Law Department and, during that time, was Dean of Studies and Co-Director of the Academy of European Law. Her interests lie broadly in EU and European law especially its labour and social dimensions.
Practicalities
This lecture will be hybrid. To register, please email sgel-fdr@uva.nl. Drinks and snacks will follow after the lecture.
