The Global South Writes Back

The first essay on this site borrowed from Edward Said the observation that due diligence frameworks constitute a geography in which the south is the object of knowledge and never its author, a place described, scored and risk-rated in instruments it did not write. I ended that essay with a commitment to something between the poles of embrace and rejection, which is the south defining itself. This essay is an attempt to take stock of how far that definition has actually progressed, because in the eighteen months this tracker has covered, something genuinely new has been happening. The countries that appear in Brussels annexes as risk geographies have started writing due diligence law of their own.

Three texts from the other direction

The clearest case of authorship is Thailand. In July 2025, the Ministry of Justice prepared a draft Act on the Promotion of Business Conduct, a bill that would place binding human rights and environmental due diligence obligations on companies operating in and from Thailand. Whatever its final shape, the draft's existence rearranges the map. Thailand is one of the most audited manufacturing and seafood economies on earth, a country whose fisheries sector spent a decade as the case study in every forced labour training deck. The state that was the permanent object of those decks has drafted its own instrument, in its own legislative language, with its own enforcement institutions contemplated. The object has picked up the pen.

India's route has been different in form and arguably further along in practice. The Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting framework, and specifically BRSR Core, imposes mandatory, assured ESG disclosure on the largest listed companies, with the obligations reaching explicitly into the value chain, so that large Indian buyers must report on the practices of their own suppliers. The regulator driving it is SEBI, a securities authority, which gives the framework a compliance culture of filings, assurance and penalties that voluntary sustainability reporting never had. One can argue about coverage and about the gentleness of its glide path, and I do argue about both. What cannot be argued is the direction: an Indian institution defining what responsible business conduct means for Indian capital, in categories built for Indian conditions, including provisions on subjects like gross wages by gender and welfare of contract workers that speak directly to how labour is actually organised here.

The third text comes from a stranger direction, and I include it because it complicates the geography productively. Italy, the producing country inside the rich world, responded to the Milan sweatshop cases by drafting a certification statute of its own, a proposed Certified Fashion Supply Chain designation under which brands could obtain third-party verification of their chains' legal compliance, supervised by the state. The bill stalled in parliament in December 2025 after unions attacked it as an attempt to purchase legal immunity, and the fight over it is still running. Set aside the merits for a moment and notice the structure. A producer economy, tired of being described by prosecutors and journalists, attempted to author the instrument that would describe it instead. That is precisely the move Thailand and India are making, and the union objection in Rome is precisely the objection that will be made, sometimes fairly, wherever the move is attempted.

The question that matters

The question is not whether the south can write these laws, because it demonstrably can. The question is whether authorship changes the terms or merely adds another layer to the pile, and the honest answer is that both futures are visible from here.

The pessimistic reading is easy to assemble. A producing-country statute written in the register of Brussels, with the same audit grammar, the same documentary burdens and the same silence about purchasing practices, does not decolonise due diligence. It merely franchises the existing model southward. Suppliers would then face the cascading demands of European buyers plus the filing requirements of their own regulators, with no instrument anywhere addressing the prices and payment terms that generate the risks both sets of paperwork describe. There are days when BRSR compliance vendors' marketing emails make this future feel already booked.
The optimistic reading requires more evidence but has some. A law written where production actually happens can regulate actors that European instruments cannot see, and the labour contractor is the proof. No instrument drafted in Brussels has ever managed to reach the mukkadam, the maistry, the sardar, the village-level recruiter through whom seasonal agricultural and construction labour actually flows, because European law's imagination of a supply chain is a chain of firms. Indian labour codes, whatever their enforcement record, at least possess the categories. A due diligence regime built on those categories, obligating the domestic buyer and the domestic contractor rather than only the distant brand, would regulate the relationships where the harm actually lives. Similarly, a Thai statute can address recruitment fees charged in Thai villages by Thai brokers, which is where the debt bondage in those seafood decks always began, and which no amount of European import control has ever touched.
There is also a quieter advantage, which is data sovereignty. Under the current architecture, the south's social and environmental information flows upward into platforms owned in the north, is scored by methodologies written in the north, and is sold back to the north as risk intelligence, a transaction the previous essay in this series priced. Domestic disclosure regimes at least keep the record, and the power to define its categories, within reach of the workers and communities the record describes.
## What this publication will watch
I am not going to predict which reading wins, because the outcome will be decided law by law, and deciding it is partly the point of tracking. What I will do is state the tests this publication intends to apply, so that when the Thai act reaches parliament and when BRSR's value chain provisions bite, the judgement is made against declared criteria rather than mood.
Does the instrument reach the intermediaries, the contractors and recruiters, whom northern law cannot see? Does it regulate purchasing practices and payment terms, or only the conduct of the weakest parties? Does it give workers and communities standing to use it, in their own languages and through their own organisations, or does it route everything through corporate filings? And does it talk to the northern regimes as an equal, claiming recognition for its findings, or does it accept the role of a feeder system supplying data upward?

A south that writes back in the coloniser's grammar has changed the byline and nothing else. A south that writes its own categories, for its own labour markets, with its own people holding the pen and the standing to enforce, would change what this entire field is. The drafts now on tables in Bangkok, Delhi and, in its own way, Rome are the first real evidence of which it will be, and this tracker was built for exactly this watch.