Historically indigenous people have been mostly acted upon by corporations, but increasingly indigenous people are themselves emerging as corporate actors. With this emergence comes new perspectives on corporate law, corporate governance, and sustainability that reimagine the role of the shareholder, the responsibilities of the board, and the ethics of corporate action. Indigenous people enact their own autochthonous law to govern corporate behavior and enforce these laws in their own legal systems. As indigenous people emerge as corporate actors, they will learn from existing corporate behavior, but their chthonic approaches to corporate law and governance also have much to teach other communities about how to achieve sustainable corporate action. This chapter explores the unique indigenous perspective on corporations and sustainability.

This chapter introduces the Handbook, providing an overview of its aims and structure, as well as the core research questions that the contributions to it collectively address. It discusses sustainability-related problems associated with the legal form of the corporation, and provides background on state-of-the-art research in natural sciences and other relevant fields that inform our understanding of sustainability. It concludes with specific research questions and a presentation of the Handbook’s structure.

This chapter concludes the Handbook, returning to the research questions set out in the introduction. Drawing from the various contributions to the Handbook, this concluding chapter assesses the mismatch between global markets and territorially rooted national regulation; the impact of shareholder-orientation upon the achievement of corporate sustainability; salient trends in the organization of corporate firms, commercial markets, and financial systems; the status of various innovations in corporate law and governance and their capacity to achieve corporate sustainability; and areas where we consider the need for further research to be particularly pressing.

This chapter highlights the potential for national, international and EU stewardship developments to bring a ‘public’ coloration into investor-led governance. Departing from previous monolithic views that couch shareholder stewardship as a self-regulating, dis-embedded market mechanism solely protecting and enhancing shareholder primacy, the chapter applies a neo-Polanyian analytical framework and identifies shareholder stewardship as a policy counter-movement that operationalises socially responsible investing and environmental, social and governance investing through shareholder engagement. However, for current stewardship policies to engender fundamental behavioural changes in investment practices, some systematic regulatory intervention which will not result from bottom-up forces and market demand for investor-led norms is necessary. Ways to promote a strong sustainability approach to stewardship include the imposition of regulatory duties and mandatory disclosure regimes. The possibilities for regulatory alternatives may remain fluid, I argue, but it is important for the means of shareholder stewardship to meet its ends.

The modern corporation is often praised as the ultimate form of association. The purpose of this chapter is to challenge this claim by demonstrating the possibilities of the cooperative business model. In other words the aim is to examine how cooperatives differ from corporations, especially in terms of sustainability, to what extent cooperatives, in theory and practice, facilitate sustainability, and how cooperative law should be developed to ensure that person-oriented cooperative societies do not transform into capital-centered cooperative corporations. The findings of this chapter show that cooperatives are, in several ways, better alternatives for sustainable business operations than corporations. Concern for community is an organic part of the cooperative business model, whereas altruistic measures in the corporate context are often artificial and motivated by investor interests. However, the question yet remains whether cooperatives facilitate sustainability enough or whether they put too much emphasis on their members’ interests.

traditional response to information asymmetries in financial markets has been to require disclosure and heightened transparency in investment chains. We argue in this chapter that the trust placed in such regulatory techniques will fail to deliver sustainable investment for two reasons. The first is the structure of equity markets, which are focused on shareholder returns and excessive turnover of portfolios, preventing meaningful engagement with companies. The second is that both investors and intermediaries make a category error in placing trust in modern risk management to quantify the financial risks from climate change and other environmental changes. Our analysis leads us logically to three micro- and macroprudential policy prescriptions, namely: increasing the capital requirements on assets with so-called ‘brown’ credentials; reforming bank stress tests to reflect the uncertain financial implications of environmental damage; and pivoting central bank bond buying programmes toward green financial assets.

This chapter explores the role of corporations that participate in global supply chains and specifically the legislation emerging to address the problems that arise in a supply chain context. There is a notable shift from voluntary initiatives towards hard law solutions, in particular disclosure and due diligence requirements. The disclosure measures introduced internationally and nationally only partially contribute to sustainability. Such measures appear limited at best to achieving transparency, and they do not necessarily achieve progress in their substantive outcomes. Due diligence requirements, if backed up by enforcement sanctions, promise greater effect as they call on companies to make efforts to eradicate or mitigate their negative impacts. A key feature of the emerging due diligence will be the collaboration with stakeholders and campaigners acting on their behalf. If successful, these due diligence developments will be a significant contribution to the goals of sustainable development.

Caught between the traditional classifications of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ orientation, or ‘liberal’ and ‘coordinated’ corporate governance models, the French approach borrows from both without being firmly attached to either. The French system of corporate governance offers a hybrid model, combining the long-standing maintenance of some entrenched features of French capitalism (employee representation on the board, notably), with an innovative approach to sustainable governance. This chapter examines the corporate law and corporate governance structures of large French companies, including new compliance and due diligence programmes imposed upon companies and their suppliers.

This chapter reviews the accomplishments of the networks that form the periphery, rather than the core, of financial regulation, and places them into the larger context of international financial regulation. It is organized around their roles in the signature post-crisis regulatory institution: The Financial Stability Board’s “Compendium of Standards,” which looks to core principles from networks beyond the Basel Commission, IOSCO, and IAIS that it views as fundamental for a well-working system of financial oversight. The existence of so many financial regulatory institutions, even if some are quite small and amount to little more than task forces within the ambit of the Basel Committee, suggests that financial regulation still remains a task-specific, disaggregated enterprise. Consider, for example, deposit insurance. It is conceivable that the Basel Committee or IAIS could develop principles for effective deposit insurance on their own; deposit insurance contributes to financial stability, which is the raison d’etre of the Basel Committee, and it’s an insurance product that insurance supervisors, in theory, understand (perhaps only in theory – deposit insurance is more commonly thought of as a tool for bank regulators). The fact that Basel and the IAIS haven’t done so is a testament to the regulatory fragmentation of financial oversight.

The interlocking parts of regulatory governance amount to a form of administration. It represents the “agencification” of a previously informal and diverse regulatory process, replete with a degree of political oversight, a bureaucratic middle, and a bottom that has adopted many of the trappings of administrative law to get the work done.

The Islamic finance industry has grown significantly over recent decades and become a contender in the financial market. The defining feature of this industry is its Sharia underpinning, which provides its institutions with a different business model based on profit-loss sharing. This chapter argues that although Islamic governance does not, per se, have an equivalent term to corporate sustainability, it offers a number of key concepts that map onto the overarching themes of corporate sustainability. Salient among these concepts are: the notions of ‘khilafah’, which encompasses vicegerency and trusteeship, and the idea of social unity. However, the existing Sharia governance frameworks of Islamic financial institutions in a number of jurisdictions have some deficiencies that may undermine the advancement of the industry’s sustainability agenda. This argument will be advanced by referring to three key jurisdictions, namely, Oman, Dubai and Malaysia. The Chapter also makes some suggestions to overcome these governance challenges.

This chapter analyses access to remedies and the efficacy of enforcement mechanisms for corporate sustainability norms at domestic and international levels. It argues that meaningful discussion of remedies and their enforcement must centre on affected communities rather than corporations. Achieving full compliance with sustainability norms already poses enormous challenges, and jurisdictional fragmentation is recognised as a particularly formidable obstacle in the context of developing effective, enforceable remedies. In analysing the barriers faced, a taxonomy using two dimensions – hard law versus soft law, and victim-driven versus external-actor-driven – is presented. Principles for community-centred remedies and enforcement are proposed. They include legal empowerment of affected communities and procedures grounded in international standards. Innovatively, these procedures and remedies are envisioned as forward-looking as well as remedial, and flexible but underpinned by strong incentives for business participation. Effective community-centred remedies are also envisaged as holistic and collaborative, rather than splitting victims into atomised groups.