Papers by Carrie Bradshaw
This briefing discusses interventions to tackle food waste at each stage of the food supply chain... more This briefing discusses interventions to tackle food waste at each stage of the food supply chain (Box 1). The food supply chain can be differentiated between upstream and downstream food waste. • Upstream is the stage before food reaches consumers. It includes farming, manufacturing, and retail. It also includes Hospitality and Food Services (HaFS) before food is served to customers (pre-kitchen, inkitchen, and buffet or serving). • Downstream refers to the consumption-stage of the supply chain. This includes plate waste in HaFS, and households. Studies note levels of food wasted upstream may be underestimated, in part due to a lack of measurement and voluntary reporting. 28-47 For example, the Box 1 Food waste across the food supply chain WRAP estimates that in 2021, the UK wasted 10.7 million tonnes of food: • Farming-1.6 million tonnes. • Manufacturing (using agricultural materials to produce foods, including processing, packaging, preservation, and cooking)-1.4 million tonnes. • Retail (including distribution centres and points of sale, such as supermarkets, convenience retailers and specialist shops)-0.2 million tonnes. • Hospitality and food services (HaFS) (including wholesale distribution, and various public, private, and commercial catering settings)-1.1 million tonnes.
Food Waste Governance Architectures in Europe: Actors, Steering Modes, and Harmonization Trends
Global Challenges, 2024
The scale of food waste across Europe is alarming, and its reduction is becoming an important pub... more The scale of food waste across Europe is alarming, and its reduction is becoming an important public policy and governance issue. Sustainable Development Goal Target 12.3 constitutes a global attempt to galvanize system-level reductions. In response, layers of varied regulation and governance at regional and national levels have emerged. This paper studies the types of governance architectures visible across Europe, what policy interventions they bring, and whether responses to the food waste challenge are converging. It looks at four leading food waste jurisdictions—France, England, Norway, and Italy—and investigates the hidden realities obscured by the simplistic division of legislative/top-down versus voluntary/bottom-up approaches. It applies a governance matrix to understand the variety of food waste “steering modes”, exploring both the extent to which a regime is hierarchical and/or non-hierarchical and why. Notably, the paper also identifies some general tendencies in food waste governance, including legislative threats, challenges in distributing responsibility across the actors, focus on “low hanging fruits”, and an overall harmonization of policy responses in a neoliberal paradigm, with redistribution often pursued as a panacea for the food waste crisis.
Social Science Research Network, 2024
Journal of Environmental Law, 2018
This article explores the role of law in an emerging consensus as to the causes of food waste: a ... more This article explores the role of law in an emerging consensus as to the causes of food waste: a structural failure to value food. Food waste's legal home is waste law. The sagacity of this siting would appear to be self-evident. If there is a body of law concerned with the problem of waste generally, then why not use that body of law to address the challenges of a particular waste stream? We should test this assumption, acknowledging food's importance and difference as a resource, and keeping in mind structural causes of food waste. The article explores the limitations of waste law through an imbalance in support for anaerobic digestion over redistribution, which actively removes edible food from the food supply chain. By underpinning and validating this imbalance, waste law reflects and reinforces structural causes of food waste, rather than providing the analytical tools need to address them the problem.
Legal Studies, 2012
The business case for corporate environmental responsibility is the claim that behaving responsib... more The business case for corporate environmental responsibility is the claim that behaving responsibly makes financial sense. It is impossible to exaggerate the contemporary significance of this claim, not least in legitimising environmental concerns in the corporate sphere. However, the business case is not without significant empirical and normative limitations, as is illustrated by the corporate environmental problem of supermarket waste. This paper evaluates enlightened shareholder value under s 172 of the Companies Act 2006 in light of such business case limitations. It suggests that s 172, by procedurally mandating the business case for corporate environmental responsibility, is a retrograde step which envisions not enlightened, but rather environmentally unenlightened, shareholders.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
Coexisting and eye-watering levels of food abundance, waste, overconsumption and hunger, are symp... more Coexisting and eye-watering levels of food abundance, waste, overconsumption and hunger, are symptomatic of a broken food system punctuated by vested interests in systematic overproduction. This article evaluates EnglandÕs ÔnewÕ approach to food waste in light of concerns that policy-makers have framed food waste as a consumer behaviour problem, rather than a structural challenge. The Resources and Waste StrategyÕs acknowledgement of normalised overproduction is thus remarkable, but unexpected. However, frame critical analysis reveals how an apparent departure from preoccupations with economic growth, combined with promises of government action, obscure an ongoing reluctance to intervene against powerful interests and the causes (not symptoms) of food waste. Legislative proposals, rather than reducing surplus, shift the burden of redistributing food away from the state and retailers, on to charities and farmers. With England, perhaps wrongly, seen as a world-leader on food waste, this has implications for other jurisdictions, as well as forthcoming consultations.
Corporations, Responsibility and the Environment
Corporate Environmental Responsibility (CER)—that corporations can and should play an active role... more Corporate Environmental Responsibility (CER)—that corporations can and should play an active role in the governance of environmental protection—is justified primarily by reference to the business case; the claim that behaving responsibly pays. In privileging a market voice for the environment, however, the business case alone is an inadequate justification for CER. As such, this thesis considers a qualitatively different justification: that there exists normative and pragmatic space for CER within contemporary approaches to environmental law and regulation. The thesis suggests that CER is best understood and justified by reference to the positive and normative implications of decentred regulation, where regulation is no longer the preserve of government and, in view of the limitations of governmental control, nor should it be. A waste-based case study illustrates the potential and limits of CER in this regard. However, this normative space for CER in decentred environmental regulati...
Corporations, Responsibility and the Environment
Doctoral Thesis Ucl, Nov 28, 2013
Corporate Liability for Toxic Torts Abroad: Vedanta v Lungowe in the Supreme Court
Journal of Environmental Law
Multinational corporate groups pose a challenge to traditional methods of legal control, particul... more Multinational corporate groups pose a challenge to traditional methods of legal control, particularly when corporations domiciled in wealthy western countries exploit, through foreign-domiciled subsidiaries, the resources and ‘weak governance’ of the developing world. In holding England as the proper place in which to bring a claim against both a UK-domiciled company and its Zambian subsidiary, for environmental damage abroad, the Supreme Court has allegedly ‘opened the door’ to similar future actions. However, in the absence of robust and mandatory due diligence requirements, parent companies may simply retreat from comprehensively reporting on group-wide systems of management and control. A desire to avoid future ‘voluntary assumptions of responsibility’ may be the undoing of post-Vedanta optimism.
The Modern Corporation Statement on Company Law
SSRN Electronic Journal
The New Directive on the Geological Storage of Carbon Dioxide
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1350 Enlr 2009 11 3 057, Feb 2, 2012
The Modern Corporation Statement on Company Law
SSRN Electronic Journal
Legal Studies, 2020
Coexisting and eye-watering levels of food abundance, waste, overconsumption and hunger, are symp... more Coexisting and eye-watering levels of food abundance, waste, overconsumption and hunger, are symptomatic of a broken food system punctuated by vested interests in systematic overproduction. This article evaluates England's 'new' approach to food waste in light of concerns that policy-makers have framed food waste as a consumer behaviour problem, rather than a structural challenge. The Resources and Waste Strategy's acknowledgement of normalised overproduction is thus remarkable, but unexpected. However, frame critical analysis reveals how an apparent departure from preoccupations with economic growth, combined with promises of government action, obscure an ongoing reluctance to intervene against powerful interests and the causes (not symptoms) of food waste. Legislative proposals, rather than reducing surplus, shift the burden of redistributing food away from the state and retailers, on to charities and farmers. With England, perhaps wrongly, seen as a world-leader on food waste, this has implications for other jurisdictions, as well as forthcoming consultations.
Legal Studies, 2020
Coexisting and eye-watering levels of food abundance, waste, overconsumption and hunger, are symp... more Coexisting and eye-watering levels of food abundance, waste, overconsumption and hunger, are symptomatic of a broken food system punctuated by vested interests in systematic overproduction. This article evaluates England’s ‘new’ approach to food waste in light of concerns that policy-makers have framed food waste as a consumer behaviour problem, rather than a structural challenge. The Resources and Waste Strategy’s acknowledgement of normalised overproduction is thus remarkable, but unexpected. However, frame critical analysis reveals how an apparent departure from preoccupations with economic growth, combined with promises of government action, obscure an ongoing reluctance to intervene against powerful interests and the causes (not symptoms) of food waste. Legislative proposals, rather than reducing surplus, shift the burden of redistributing food away from the state and retailers, on to charities and farmers. With England, perhaps wrongly, seen as a world-leader on food waste, this has implications for other jurisdictions, as well as forthcoming consultations.
Waste Law and the Value of Food
This article explores the role of law in an emerging consensus as to the causes of food waste: a ... more This article explores the role of law in an emerging consensus as to the causes of food waste: a structural failure to value food. Food waste’s legal home is waste law. The sagacity of this siting would appear to be self-evident. If there is a body of law concerned with the problem of waste generally, then why not use that body of law to address the challenges of a particular waste stream? We should test this assumption, acknowledging food’s importance and difference as a resource, and keeping in mind structural causes of food waste. This article explores the limitations of waste law through an imbalance in support for anaerobic digestion over redistribution; an imbalance which actively removes edible food from the food supply chain. By underpinning and validating this imbalance, waste law reflects and reinforces structural causes of food waste, rather than providing the analytical tools needed to address the problem.
The business case for corporate environmental responsibility is the claim that behaving responsib... more The business case for corporate environmental responsibility is the claim that behaving responsibly makes financial sense. It is impossible to exaggerate the contemporary significance of this claim, not least in legitimising environmental concerns in the corporate sphere. However, the business case is not without significant empirical and normative limitations, as is illustrated by the corporate environmental problem of supermarket waste. This paper evaluates Enlightened Shareholder Value under section 172 of the Companies Act 2006 in light of such business case limitations. It suggests that section 172, by procedurally mandating the business case for corporate environmental responsibility, is a retrograde step which envisions not enlightened, but rather environmentally unenlightened, shareholders.
Environmental Law Review, Jan 1, 2009
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Papers by Carrie Bradshaw