Short Abstract

An African-prism panel rethinking cocoa and commodity chains beyond linear Global Value Chain models, centring borderland informality, arbitrage, and brokerage to interrogate EU due-diligence regulation's ecological, gender, and justice implications across African frontiers.

Long Abstract

Dominant accounts of African-sourced commodity chains, cocoa foremost among them, still rely on a linear Global Value Chain framework: production flows from production site-to-port-to-consumer, monitored by EU due-diligence regimes. This panel proposes an African prism to interrogate that paradigm’s blind spots through two registers held in tension: a governance/agency lens attentive to how borderland actors improvise, evade, and instrumentalize regulatory gaps as everyday practical norms; and a Marxist political-economy lens attentive to the uneven accumulation that makes such improvisation necessary, profitable, or precarious in the first place. Viewed from African borderlands, value chains appear not as sealed pipelines but as permeable, osmotic zones where goods, prices, and identities cross and re-cross state boundaries, often invisibly to formal monitoring systems. We invite papers examining how transboundary informalities, price arbitrage, kinship-based brokerage, waybill manipulation, and “re-origination” of goods reconfigure regulatory, ecological, and social outcomes across African frontiers. Along between-country and within-country axes, contributions might address: anticipatory informal land and forest-frontier strategies ahead of Northern enforcement; mirror-trade and remote-sensing methods revealing “ghost flows” invisible to customs data; land tenure exclusion channelling vulnerable communities into high-risk informal trade; and brokers, cooperatives, and traditional authorities reappropriating regulatory gaps for personal benefit. By centring borderland actors over external compliance regimes, this panel argues for an African-centred political ecology of resource governance, treating informality not as deviation but as a structuring logic, with implications for environmental justice, gender equity, and the future of EU sustainability regulation on the continent.

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