Summary
In contemporary discourse, the need to address urgent environmental issues with a social perspective is widely acknowledged. While theories on policy integration have primarily focused on the national scale, limited attention has been given to the merging of environmental and human rights considerations in global supply chain sustainability governance. Drawing on policy integration theories, this paper develops an analytical framework for studying Human Rights and Environmental Integration (HREI) within global supply chain governance, specifically examining the deforestation-land tenure nexus in soy supply chains from Brazil to Europe. Analysis focuses on key policy instruments, including the Soy Moratorium, the Working Group on the Cerrado, the Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS), and the EU Regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR). The report assesses the integration of land tenure in these policy instruments, revealing a general weakness in this aspect. Nonetheless, the paper finds that grassroots organizations have played a crucial role in advocating for enhanced HREI, urging the inclusion of land tenure rights in instruments addressing deforestation. The research highlights that, although global supply chain instruments may not entirely compensate for the deficiencies of domestic policies, they should, at the very least, strive to comprehensively address complex sustainability problems and prevent actions that could worsen existing issues or give rise to new sustainability problems.