Studies on the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive

The article-based thesis concerns the EU regulation on sustainability reporting for large corporations, the so-called Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). My thesis treats the CSRD as an attempt to build a legal infrastructure for sustainability governance in the EU. A system meant to produce useful, comparable and publicly accountable information and to influence corporate behaviour, supervisory authorities, and capital allocation. The central argument is that the CSRD’s effectiveness depends less on any single provision than on the interaction between its main building blocks: how “material” sustainability information is defined and filtered, how binding standards are produced and controlled, how those standards function in a global reporting environment, how compliance is supervised and sanctioned in practice, how political “simplification” reforms reshape the underlying data set, and how these developments feed back into the evolving understanding of corporate purpose and board responsibilities. My thesis therefore consists of articles which each concern themselves with these topics.