Conceptualising Corporate Sustainability Law

Abstract

Business in aggregate remains a driver for the extreme unsustainabilities of our time. Amid a plethora of regulatory initiatives for sustainable business, laws and policies continue to be siloed, fragmented and partly counterproductive, working against overarching societal aims. As a response, I conceptualise Corporate Sustainability Law; a sustainability-oriented field of law. To demonstrate the significance of Corporate Sustainability Law, I employ its theoretical framework and analytical approach to discuss three examples: the EU’s Sustainable Finance initiative, the Sustainable Corporate Governance initiative, and pushback against these initiatives, in the form of ‘Omnibus’ proposals to ‘simplify’ and deregulate. The aim with these analyses is to show how Corporate Sustainability Law can contribute to identifying barriers to change as well as seeds of hope and ways in which these can be nurtured to fruition.