Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Global Value Chains: Governance, Regulation and Liability

Our focus is on the legal conceptualization of greenhouse gas emissions from transnational production. Apportioning greenhouse gas emissions from transnational production to specific private actors, to say nothing of related governance, regulatory and liability issues, poses a challenge for the current, primarily state-centric approach to climate change mitigation. The current approach, allocating emissions to sites of production, has been criticized for not reflecting the reality of transnational consumption or control of production. We propose that global value chain theory provides a useful heuristic tool for the legal conceptualization of greenhouse gases from a holistic, transnational production perspective as a crucial complement to current state-centric approaches. Using global value chain theory as our starting point, we show how emissions from transnational production constitute a phenomenon that can be tackled on the level of law through a combination of private governance, regulation and private law doctrine. We argue that this approach enables a tighter integration of transnational greenhouse gas emissions into international, regional and local climate regulations. In doing so it also offers a glimpse on the future of sustainable private law.