Corporate Compliance with the French Duty of Vigilance Act: Evidence from a Qualitative Study

This paper examines how firms subject to the French Duty of Vigilance Act (DVA), a pioneering legal framework requiring the development and monitoring of vigilance plans to identify risks and prevent serious human rights violations, approach legal compliance in practice. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with those responsible for designing and implementing these plans, it analyses the main challenges companies encounter and the strategies they adopt. The findings reveal substantial heterogeneity in compliance practices, shaped by organisational motives, internal capabilities and external pressures. To account for this complexity, the paper proposes an exploratory model structured around three dimensions: (1) firms’ underlying motives , (2) the organisational capabilities that enable or constrain compliance and (3) the broader social, economic and political environment . The article concludes by presenting the conceptual model and outlining key contributions and directions for future research.