The challenges of the EU "Green Deal"

Climate change is a complex problem involving many stakeholders, each with different goals. For multinational corporations (MNCs), the EU’s Green Deal creates challenging goal conflicts, such as the one between resilience and environmental sustainability. Resilience involves quick adaptation to disruptions (e.g., Covid-19, geopolitical crises), while environmental sustainability involves minimizing environmental impact and the practice of conducting operations in a manner that preserves and protects natural resources for future generations. These goals could create tensions since resilience often requires swift, costly measures to manage immediate threats and disruptions, which can contradict more long-term sustainability goals.

A key issue for MNCs is building sustainable supply chains. Recent research highlights the need to reorganize these chains to enhance resilience while complying with stricter environmental regulations. However, combining sustainability and resilience in supply chains is challenging due to differing time perspectives, resource use, and strategic priorities.

This project aims to explore the impact of EU’s Green Deal on Swedish MNCs' strategies for developing resilient and environmentally sustainable global supply chains. We are interested in the role that the EU's Green Deal plays regarding potential conflicting goals and trade-offs between resilience and environmental sustainability, and how companies manage these contradictions. This will be done by a set of interviews with MNC managers to provide insights into how this comprehensive policy package impacts companies in their efforts to develop resilient and environmentally sustainable supply chain solutions for the future.