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Abstract This article explores fundamental challenges facing global value chains, arguing that prevailing approaches are overly linear and extractive, and that they should instead be understood and governed as global value networks shaped in recognition of the interdependence, and diverse social, environmental, and political contexts in which they operate. It contends that traditional models obscure how value is created, how costs and risks are distributed, and how long-term resilience is either enabled or undermined across global production systems. Drawing on the concept of value networks and the framework of seven critical shifts developed and applied by Hannah Cunneen during her time at Forum for the Future, and subsequently evolved in practice by Henrietta Hunter, the article uses this work as an analytical lens rather than a prescriptive structure. While these ‘shifts’ inform the analysis, they are not each addressed as discrete sections. Instead, the article explores how key dynamics recur across global value networks, including fairness in decision-making and the exercise of power, pricing and the treatment of real social and environmental costs, the importance of context and relationships, shared responsibility for decarbonization and resilience, and the role of data and trust in enabling more effective and equitable outcomes. In doing so, it highlights how current commercial practices often externalize harm and transfer risk onto the least powerful actors, while also pointing to the conditions and interventions through which these challenges can be more effectively addressed, and considers the implications for legal and business audiences seeking to intervene more effectively in the governance of global value networks.