Title: Developing a corporate director's internal fiduciary duty to promote corporate sustainability: a comparative survey of hard and soft laws benchmarking Nigerian law

Authors: Olawale Ajai

Addresses: Lagos Business School, Pan Atlantic University, Lagos, Nigeria

Abstract: Sustainable development has attained the character of a global objective, ideology and imperative enshrined in the Global Compact and other, usually voluntary arrangements to promote corporate sustainability. This has given greater cogency and topicality to the debate about the objective and responsibilities of companies and duties of company directors. This article is a comparative survey of companies' laws, sustainability laws and norms from various jurisdictions and by using Nigerian law as a benchmark seeks to elaborate a conceptual framing of a fiduciary duty on directors to promote corporate sustainability. An explicit new duty to 'promote corporate sustainability and the success of the company' and some vital considerations and devices for evolving Green companies and sustainable capitalism are examined.

Keywords: corporate governance code; corporate sustainability; CSR; director's duties; duty to promote corporate sustainability; Nigeria; stakeholder theory; sustainable capitalism; sustainable development; sustainability reporting.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBGE.2018.097384

International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, 2018 Vol.13 No.2, pp.170 - 198

Received: 26 Dec 2017
Accepted: 19 Oct 2018
Published online: 16 Jan 2019 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article