In the midst of a multidimensional crisis with economic, social and environmental aspects, corporations have become aware that the reality of our day necessitates that they must play a dual role both for their businesses and for the general public. A primary reason for the change in this perception is the alarming state of the environment and especially the potentially irreversible effects of the climate crisis. As a living and evolving entity within society, companies now take on the public duty to address the mounting concerns about the environment and adopt environmentally sustainable corporate strategies. While doing this, many of them refer to the stakeholder theory. Almost forty years ago, the stakeholder theory was introduced by Freeman as a management concept. Including environmental sustainability within the scope of the stakeholder theory is, therefore, a fairly new approach and raises the following question: Is the stakeholder theory the best tool to integrate environmental sustainability into corporate activity? This article will aim to demonstrate why the answer to this question should be ‘no’. Adding to this, it will then discuss how legal reform in the area of corporate law focusing on the key concepts of corporate interest and directors’ duties should be done instead.

The cataclysmic consequences of climate change and biodiversity loss are revealed in the climate disruptions and escalating extinction of species around the globe. The causes of global warming are directly associated with carbon emissions, the result of the fossil fuel industry and deforestation. Species extinction stems from unfettered resource extraction and the contamination and modification of Nature linked to the growth imperatives of global capitalism. These are crimes of ecocide, crimes that involve foreknowledge, government-provided legitimacy and unprecedented harms to humans, ecosystems and non-human environmental entities such as rivers, mountains, trees, birds and koalas. This article synthesises ideas about ecocentrism, rights of Nature and ecocide within a general framework of criminal law (e.g. prohibition via criminalisation) and social obligation (e.g. prescription via a general environmental duty of care). How best to bring carbon criminals and environmental vandals to justice is the crucial question of our age. As with crimes of the powerful generally, there are profound difficulties in dealing with corporate criminality and state-corporate crime. And yet climate justice demands nothing less than transformative change in circumstance. An ecology-based general duty of care provides a framework whereby social obligation is entrenched in a manner that simultaneously reinforces the criminality of ecocide.

EU competition law potentially has a role to play in the pursuit of sustainability goals and the fight against climate change. The need to interpret the EU competition law provisions in a manner consistent with the sustainability objectives that the EU is committed to – the sustainable development goals (SDGs), and the EU Green Deal and derived policies – is emphasised in this article. While agreements between competitors are generally prohibited by Article 101 TFEU, cooperation agreements among market actors pursuing sustainability objectives (sustainability agreements) might in certain situations fall under the cartel exception of Article 101(3) TFEU. In recent years, there have been numerous calls to clarify conditions under which sustainability agreements can be allowed under EU competition law, especially under Article 101(3) TFEU, and there is a heated debate among academics, national competition authorities (NCAs) and the European Commission. After questioning whether the objectives and measures of the agreements are being properly assessed with the current trends (for example, with the willingness-to-pay method), this article will add to the debate another possibility involving a broad interpretation of Article 101(3) TFEU under which the pursuit of sustainability agreements will be facilitated. Such a possibility will largely depend on the objectives of the agreements themselves and may allow a proper consideration of the objectives of a sustainability agreement for certain cases, by focusing on agreements that pursue pre-established objectives derived from international or national standards or concrete policy objectives that are not previously mandatory for the companies involved.

The question is no longer whether we should move to an environmentally sustainable way of living; rather, the question is – how are we supposed to do that? Katharina Pistor’s seminal book The Code of Capital pointed out that our current form of capitalism is enabled by private law, which selectively ‘codes’ certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. Law can be changed by the legislature, but legal concepts can equally be imbued with new meanings due to changing ways of seeing in society. Indeed, our investigation into two legal innovations – the Community Land Trust (CLT) and the Zoöp model – demonstrates how little change of the legal hardware of society is required for meaningful legal change in service of sustainability in the city and beyond. Whereas the CLT rethinks the stewardship function of property rights, the Zoöp model transforms corporate governance structures to consider nonhumans’ interests – and both do so without waiting for relevant legal changes to be enacted by legislatures. To evaluate the potential and the limitations of these two legal innovations, we assess the extent to which these innovations align with four ‘glocal’ lenses of the Doughnut model developed by the British economist Kate Raworth: to what extent to these legal innovations support the thriving of humans and environment both locally and globally?