Abstracts
Law is essential for achieving all large-scale societal and structural changes, including the transformation to sustainability that the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set out to achieve. Law recognizes sustainability on an overarching level and yet in many practically important areas law has not managed to implement that recognition. It has become increasingly clear that law is of crucial importance to secure sustainability and at the same time, that law has failed us. Yet, there is hope.
This chapter, forthcoming in a multi-disciplinary edited volume, starts out with a short presentation of why sustainability and law has become my field of research.
As opposed to when I started in academia, sustainability is now a hot topic. In my field of business law, especially after the adoption of the SDGs in 2015, there is much sustainability talk in all areas of business and related to business.
However, it is often unclear what the underlying concept of sustainability is or indeed if there is any underlying concept at all. It is therefore crucial to start out any discussion of sustainability with a clarification of how the concept is used. In this chapter, I therefore introduce the research-based concept that I apply in the chapter, explaining also its relationship to the SDGs.
With that backdrop, I discuss the significance of law and law’s failure, and I explore law’s possibilities, drawing on examples from my area of research on business, law and sustainability and from the European legal context. In the concluding section, I speak about how I remain optimistic that it is possible to achieve sustainability – but that it will not happen on its own. It will take a whole jigsaw puzzle of concentrated efforts and we all have a role to play.
Preprint available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4212422