Abstract
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. Beate Sjåfjell conceptualises Corporate Sustainability Law as a response. Corporate Sustainability Law is an interdisciplinary, sustainability-oriented regulatory framework, concentrating on the normative promotion of corporate sustainability (the contribution of business to sustainability, understood as a safe and just world).
The aim is to facilitate interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary regulatory analyses, to explore changes in the identification and boundaries of actors and their rights and duties; ways forward towards the necessary fundamental transformation of business; and continued gaps, incoherencies, and barriers. With its broad approach, Corporate Sustainability Law can contribute to breaking down vertical and horizontal regulatory silos, and dismantling dichotomies in prevailing perceptions of business and its role in society.
The board has, as a matter of law, a crucial role in the governance of business, and is therefore central to the fundamental transformation towards corporate sustainability. The evolving duties of the board of globalised businesses are analysed as an illustration of Corporate Sustainability Law.
Read the full abstract on SSRN, where the working paper will be made available later this semester.
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