Regulating logistics: compliance capitalism or compliance environmentalism ?

Compliance capitalism offers potential solutions to disruptions and challenges in global trade by aiming to internalize social and environmental concerns into the increasingly required checks and balances along the supply chain. However, the explicit connection between compliance and capitalism risks prioritizing capitalist imperatives over planetary boundaries. This article argues that compliance should primarily align with geophysical constraints rather than with economic growth. Drawing on earth system science, doughnut economics, and critical perspectives on global trade, the article challenges conventional economic assumptions about limitless growth within finite systems. It explores the tensions between capitalist extraction and earth system stewardship, arguing that current compliance mechanisms often serve to incrementally improve fundamentally exploitative practices rather than transform the underlying environmental and social problems. The article calls for a reversal of priorities, placing compliance with planetary boundaries above the extractive needs of capitalism. This approach, termed ‘compliance environmentalism’, is presented as a necessary evolution in our understanding of global trade and logistics, which might come at the expense of capitalism itself.