Competition Law and Social Welfare Sustainability Goals

In recent times, there has been the desire to see to the actualization of sustainability goals in every way possible. One of the ways in which sustainability goals are sought to be achieved is the use of competition law. This desire to advance sustainability through competition law gives rise to a debate on its possibility. At the root of the debate is the seeming incompatibility between competition law and sustainability. While competition law protects economic interests on one hand, sustainability promotes non-economic interests on the other hand. Ordinarily, one would have thought sustainability as a concept only relates to environmental protection. But the widespread nature of the concept has surprisingly included concerns that may on the surface appear remote to sustainability such as the employment rights, inequality, access to quality health care, food sufficiency, safe consumption, general social wellbeing and more within its scope. The question is thus how could it be possible to accommodate the non-economic sustainability concerns in the realm of competition law? To answer this question, numerous proposals were put forward by scholars. This chapter analyses the proposals and concludes that integrating the sustainability goals into the primary goals of competition law will unnecessarily expand the scope of competition law and make the mandate of the competition regulators obscure. The chapter recommends for an incidental instead of an eventful promotion of sustainable goals through competition law. The authorities should at best encourage the promotion and observance of the goals by the market players through incentives not by coercive means.