Companies are among the biggest polluters worldwide. Since 2016, just 57 corporate and state producing entities have been responsible for 80 percent of global CO₂ emissions. At the same time, we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, in which biodiversity is disappearing at an alarming rate. This context makes it [...]
Microsoft and the scale of e-waste In 2018, October 14th was designated as International E-Waste Day by the WEEE Forum to raise awareness about the staggering volumes of discarded electronics and the critical raw materials they contain. In 2025, E-Waste Day happened to coincide with the end of Microsoft’s extended support for its operating system Windows [...]
The text below was drafted as the conclusions of the Conference “Transformative Ownership in Times of Overlapping Crisis”, held in Amsterdam, 5-6 October 2023. We are preparing a longer white paper on the basis of the conference contributions. Hence, any reactions to the text below are welcome. Please send them to: M.Bartl@uva.nl and r.j.g.claassen@uu.nl.I. [...]
Amsterdam’s vision of becoming a sustainable city We have been fascinated by two small bottom-up initiatives in and around Amsterdam: the Community Land Trust in Amsterdam South-East and the so-called Zoöp. In a recent article, we analyse the potential and the limitations of these two bottom-up legal innovations to assess how they could [...]
Can Shell claim to be the Netherlands’ largest investor in green energy in its advertisements? At the start of this month a new Code on Sustainability Advertisement was adopted by the Dutch Advertising Code Committee (Stichting Reclame Code Comissie) – the self-regulation body that deals with rules on advertisements in the Netherlands. Over the [...]
This blog was featured earlier on the Verfassungsblog. September 15th 2022 was a big day for the climate movement. The owner of Patagonia – a large multinational corporation producing wearables – transferred 98% of his shares (worth 3 billion dollars) to the newly established Holdfast Collective, a foundation aimed at fighting climate change. The [...]
The dispute settlement mechanism of the Energy Charter Treaty (‘ECT’) has been proving to be an obstacle for States in their quest to meet climate obligations. The ECT aims to ensure the protection of investments and in turn investors. Any measure implemented by a State that can causes a negative effect to these investments [...]
The work of turning ‘the economy’; ‘the political’ and ‘global law’ from a priori concepts into questions is a critical one for our time, as these forms have come to dominate so much of how everyday activities are framed and valued in communities around the world. By way of cursory background, ‘economy’ comes from [...]
Who defines economy and value in international law? Who is left out? And what are the implications for social and environmental justice? A useful starting point may be to acknowledge that people value different things. In terms of what should constitute ‘the economy’, people count different things and do so in diverse ways [...]
In our discussion about sustainable global economic law last December, Matt Canfield asked us several questions to guide our conversation. We reproduce them to structure our contribution here, which we offer as a dialogue (trialogue, including Matt’s questions). Rather than assigning names, we distinguish our voices with underlining, italics, and unmodified typeface. How [...]