Australia’s relatively conservative corporate law regime does not reflect developments in the soft law and culture in support of corporate sustainability. There is only weak support for sustainability under the Australian legal framework, in particular in the context of directors’ duties. But this orthodox legal regime is being overtaken by a strengthening sustainability culture in Australia, as evidenced by empirical research on director attitudes; relevant listing rules and corporate governance principles; increasing institutional investor interest in sustainability; strengthened non-financial reporting rules, including in the context of labour standards and global supply chains; and other recent developments. The chapter concludes that the past decade has seen a cultural shift led by the ASX Corporate Governance Council, major institutional investor groups, and individual proponents from the legal and business communities towards a strongly increased emphasis on sustainability.

IAIS represents the lowest level of elaboration achieved by a financial regulatory network to date, though it has recently made an effort to develop Basel Committee-style rules for capital requirements on internationally active insurers. There has been no iterated capital adequacy a la Basel, however. The IAIS also offers a paler replica of IOSCO’s great achievement, the memorandum of enforcement cooperation. For much of its existence, IAIS has focused on best practices and rough principles of financial regulation, the standard foundation for the elaboration of network cooperation.

This chapter explores how corporate sustainability has been addressed in Japan. The Japanese companies’ awareness of the environment has been high, especially since the 1990s, promoted by the government’s various policies. However, all these policies are non-statutory, while the traditional corporate law theory has been reluctant to acknowledge corporate social responsibility (as the issue has traditionally been known). More recent reform of corpgovernance risks. This is despite the fact that the primary focus of the reform has been on the shift to the shareholder primacy idea, departing from the traditional stakeholder-oriented corporate governance of Japanese companies. With these complexities, it is anticipated that corporate sustainability will become a commonly acknowledged issue of corporate governance in Japan in the coming years.orate governance, facilitated through the implementation of the Corporate Governance Code and Stewardship Code, acknowledges the significance of sustainability and environmental, social and

One question posed by the international regime of financial regulation is how newcomers will respond to it. China, with its one-party government, cultural uniqueness, and relatively recent embrace of financial capitalism presents a distinctive test of the willingness of the developing world to buy into a system of globalized governance that has largely been devised by others. But if this lack of participation suggests that there may be reasons why China – and the rest of the developing world – would want to stay out of the international financial regulatory regime, there are, as we will see, many reasons to suspect that there are incentives encouraging them to join it. Thus far, China has not complained about its lack of power over the international regulatory process that it has joined. It has embraced both G20 membership and financial regulatory cooperation, and joined the relevant networks.

This chapter provides an analysis of the transformation of the corporate landscape in Central Eastern Europe after 1989, by reference to the sustainable development goals. The argument is that the neoliberal prescriptions to transform the socialist corporate landscape were so antithetical to sustainability goals that the corporations resulting from that transformation have actually pushed the reach of sustainability goals further away. The corporations resulting from the transformation will not pursue any sustainability goals without tremendous international pressure, as national corporate cultures and social realities developed during this transformation hinder the pursuit of sustainable development.

This chapter evaluates the differences–and surprising similarities–between financial regulation, which does not count as “hard” law and international law, which does count as hard law. As it turns out, though, both depend on domestic institutions to enforce their rules, both institutions are negotiated and iterative, rather than fixed and stable, and both are best at facilitating mutually beneficial cooperation, rather than resolving zero sum disputes.Understanding how international financial regulation achieves its legitimacy through a series of domestic processes, rather than an international one gleaned from state practice and treaty commitments, provides a perspective on public international law.

Over recent decades, a host of smaller jurisdictions have become extraordinarily dominant in specialized fields of cross-border corporate and financial services. Chief among them are Hong Kong and Singapore, both regarded as among the world’s most significant financial centers. This chapter analyzes their track records in achieving corporate sustainability and concludes that each is at once a leader and a laggard, depending on one’s perspective. The analysis highlights complex questions regarding how we ought to conceptualize and evaluate corporate sustainability in an era increasingly defined by the free movement of capital – because Hong Kong and Singapore represent microcosms of our increasingly globalized financial world. The challenges faced in assessing the sustainability of their corporate, financial, and economic models reflect underlying challenges in assessing the sustainability of unfettered global capital mobility.

A community company, designed to look beyond profits and provide for community involvement in decision making, was introduced in Solomon Islands in 2010. This chapter assesses the extent to which business, social and customary norms have impacted the slow take up of this entity. Business interests, both domestic and foreign, show preference for the easily identifiable traditional corporate form, shying away from this innovative entity. Facilitating institutions such as banks and insurance companies are reluctant to deal with unfamiliar corporate structures, making it difficult for such entities to grow. Participation by community members reiterates social norms, leaving control in the hands of individuals with high status, which rarely challenges dominant understandings of development. This chapter explores ways to overcome the resistance to the community company and realise its potential for enabling sustainable development across the Pacific.

The chapter examines the legislation of corporate sustainability in South Africa through the introduction of the Social and Ethics Committee under the country’s current Companies Act, 2008. It is argued that this is a board committee of a special kind, with original board powers. Given its far-reaching powers with regard to corporate sustainability matters – including social and economic development, good corporate citizenship, consumer relations to labour and employment, the environment, health and public safety – it is argued that the Social and Ethics Committee should be seen as the second board in companies required to have this structure.

This chapter summarizes the fundamentals of U.S. corporate law, including limited liability, corporate objectives, fiduciary duty, and shareholder information, voting, litigation, and exit rights. It also canvasses legal innovations (e.g., benefit corporations and sustainability disclosures) and explains their relevance to incorporating sustainability as part of broader corporate practice. This review reveals few legal barriers to U.S. corporations pursuing sustainability, although important practical factors can frustrate attempts to engage in such efforts. In the shareholder-oriented American corporate and business environment, the drive for pursuing such changes will need to come from asset owners and markets themselves.

What happens when sustainability concerns clash with the company’s bottom line? On paper, various systems should deter unsustainable behavior: fear of liability (legal sanctions), diminished business opportunities (reputational sanctions), or guilty feelings (moral sanctions). Yet, in reality, companies do not take these legal, reputational, and moral sanctions as given. They rather count on their ability to dilute the expected sanctions. Companies reduce the probability of being caught by controlling the information environment and creating plausible deniability. They are often the ones dictating the public perception of whether they behaved sustainably or not. Companies can also dilute the sanction that is imposed once they are caught, by capturing the regulators, and reducing the guilt associated with immoral behavior. Recognizing that all systems of control can be gamed opens up space for rethinking policy implications, such as designing the legal system in ways that balance the non-legal systems’ areas of malleability.

This book tells the story of how we moved from a world in which there was no way for regulators or investors to grasp the risks that rogue financial institutions were taking abroad to one in which international processes govern the most important rules under which financial institutions of any size operate. It is a tale about the creation and evolution of a new form of global governance – the regulatory network – that has provided detailed, organized, and binding governance without adhering to the traditional mechanisms of international or administrative law. International financial regulation works like an administrative agency stretched onto a global multilateral context.

The chapter examines the merits of current and proposed EU regulation in the area of corporate sustainability with a particular emphasis on corporate groups. It provides an overview of the EU approach to corporate sustainability and its perception of sustainability as a legal concept, and then considers the importance of corporate groups in the global market and the inherent challenge of regulating cross-border activity. Building on a heterogeneous perception of groups, the chapter examines the current state of EU sustainability initiatives for corporate groups, and considers the extent to which the EU has managed to harness its influence to steer corporate groups onto a sustainable pathway.

This chapter explores sustainability reporting regimes in six African countries representing sub-regions of the continent – Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Nigeria, Botswana and South Africa. It reveals that Africa is catching up on sustainability reporting as each jurisdiction is found to have a sustainability reporting regime with an identified regulatory model(s). However, the conflicting nature of sustainability reporting standards calls for a broader reform strategy or policy harmonisation. It thus argues that the African Peer Review Mechanism, Regional Economic Communities, and new African Continental Free Trade Area present opportunities for sustainability reporting policy harmonisation in Africa. It is further argued that African regimes should jettison self-regulatory sustainability reporting models and opt for sanctions-based models or hybrid models combining mandatory and voluntary approaches. It observes, however, that the future of sustainability reporting in Africa lies in integrated reporting with its impact not just on corporate performance but also on strong sustainability.

The German system of company law and corporate governance is often referred to as a ‘stakeholder value system’ which places it in opposition to Anglo-American ‘shareholder value systems’. This characterisation suggests more scope for the promotion of corporate sustainability. This chapter analyses to what extent key aspects of German company law and corporate governance constitute barriers and create opportunities for sustainable development. These include the question in whose interest German public limited companies (Aktiengesellschaften) are run, the co-determined supervisory board in the two-tier board system, the fact that the executive remuneration structure should be aimed at the ‘company’s sustainable development’, shareholder rights and mandatory nonfinancial information disclosure. It is argued that there is, contrary to the prevailing perception, little scope in German company law and corporate governance for the promotion of the social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.

This chapter describes important elements of the corporate governance system in Russia, such as the structure of stock ownership, the basic laws and regulations. Special attention is given to related-party transactions, the use of foreign law and the new Corporate Governance Code. The chapter summarizes the empirical literature on the relation between corporate governance and corporate sustainability in emerging markets and provides evidence on measures of corporate sustainability and the quality of corporate governance in Russia. It is argued that the weakness of civil society and independent media effectively limits the demand for corporate sustainability. This demand is therefore potentially represented only by the government, which in turn faces a conflict of interest as the regulator and as a shareholder of large companies, in particular in the oil and gas sector.

Despite various international initiatives and soft/hard law reforms over the last two decades, concerns abound as the extent to which the sustainability agenda has become embedded in emerging economies. This chapter focuses on Mauritius, specifically the emergence of a sustainability discourse as part of corporate governance reforms, the enactment of a national sustainable development agenda, and the implementation of the first corporate social responsibility legislation in the world, requiring companies to finance related projects. Our empirical analysis, primarily focused on corporate settings, and informed by the country’s socio-economic and political contexts, reveals wide variation in corporate engagement and the advent of a form of state control over the execution of projects. Overall, our implications seek to identify lessons for other emerging economies, particularly in terms of state-level attempts to mandate corporate social responsibility.