New norms for foreign natural resource governance

Martijn Vlaskamp, a postdoctoral fellow in the Program on Order, Conflict and Violence at the MacMillan Center, has recently published the article “Mandatory due diligence for ‘conflict minerals’ and illegally logged timber: Emergence and cascade of a new norm on foreign accountability” in The Extractive Industries and Society journal. The paper is co-written with Lena Partzsch (University of Freiburg).

The authors discuss how a new foreign accountability norm is influencing natural resource governance. In the past years both the EU and the United States have adopted policies, which oblige companies to conduct supply chain due diligence measures regarding the social and environmental conditions under which imported natural resources have been extracted. Analyzing the cases of ‘conflict minerals’ and illegally logged timber, Partzsch and Vlaskamp argue that the emergence of this norm is a result of strategic framing by advocacy NGOs.

Vlaskamp is also a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Institut de Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI). This article is part of his research project GLONEXACO (The Global-Local Nexus of Armed Conflicts: The interlinkages between natural resource-fueled armed conflicts and the EU’s raw materials supply). He is participant of the EU-IANUS project and a member of the research group Observatory of European Foreign Policy.