Preface

This book originates from the Sustainable Companies Project (2010-2014),1 an international scholarly network whose principal aim has been to deepen our understanding of how company law hinders or facilitates corporate environmental responsibility. In an innovative stance, this project has sought to shift the dominant focus beyond environmental law to the role of company law and related areas of business regulation in promoting sustainable development. Our vision has been to contribute to the conceptual framework and tools to realise the potential of some companies to make independent, creative, and significant contributions to mitigate climate change and other global environmental problems. Climate change provides a powerful example illustrating the broader challenges in promoting corporate environmental and social responsibility through company law reform. The Sustainable Companies Project has received invaluable funding from the Research Council of Norway, under its programme ‘Norwegian Environmental Research towards 2015’. The Project’s broad international scope was made possible through the academic contributions of a team of scholars from all continents. While only a few team members were directly involved in the writing of this book, the analysis, especially in the chapters on comparative company law (Chapter 3, ‘Shareholder primacy: The main barrier to sustainable companies’ by Sjåfjell and others) and accounting law (Chapter 5, ‘Accounting, auditing, and reporting: Supporting or obstructing the sustainable companies objective?’ by Villiers and Mähönen), draws on the original research of the Project’s many scholars. We thank them all for their fine contributions, constructive feedback, and unwavering enthusiasm for the project and this book. For the book manuscript itself, we express our gratitude not only, of course, to the chapters’ authors, but also to the University of Oslo research assistants, Linn Anker-Sørensen and Elisabeth Hvaal Lingaas, for their technical support. The subject matter of this book is timely and significant. We need bold new approaches to curb environmentally unsustainable trends.