Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Disputes: Litigation and Arbitration comes at a time when ESG has become more than simply a corporate aspiration and instead rather a source of actual dispute risk. Sustainability commitments are now embedded in contracts, financing arrangements, disclosure regimes, due diligence practices, and corporate governance structures. The disputes that arise will test not only whether such commitments are legally actionable but also what standards they imply and which fora are best equipped to address them.

The editors, Lim and Mitsi, bring complementary practitioner–academic perspectives to this rapidly developing field. Their contribution shows that ESG is not simply a matter of corporate branding or ethical positioning. Rather, it is a system of norm-generating pressures that are increasingly solidified into legally relevant expectations, duties, and claims. This book is therefore particularly useful for disputes lawyers as it treats ESG as not an abstract policy vocabulary but rather a framework that is already reshaping litigation strategy, arbitral argument, procedural design, and remedial imagination.

The design of this edited book is one of its key strengths. Rather than treating ESG disputes as a standalone doctrinal category, the edited volume maps ESG across a series of overlapping dispute contexts, including arbitration and arbitral procedure, climate change and sustainability litigation, major construction projects, private equity and M&A transactions, inter-state arbitration, and shareholder or corporate accountability claims. This framing is particularly effective as ESG disputes rarely come in neat, separated boxes. Environmental harm, human rights, corruption, governance, and reporting controversies often come together in one dispute, even when framed by conventional causes of action.

A recurring and valuable theme throughout this book is its consideration of the role of soft law in operation. The book takes a look at various instruments and how these instruments have been used to establish standards of care, interpret ESG contractual clauses, and even determine what might be considered reasonable corporate behaviour. The book shows how ESG disputes are often decided not by declaring soft law formally binding but rather by tracing how such norms have already been internalised through governance, reporting, project design, and decision-making.

The book is also suitably practice-facing without collapsing into a checklist. It provides a clear outline of a field that still remains unsettled, whilst being alert to the procedural and institutional challenges that will shape ESG dispute resolution in the future, including forum selection, confidentiality, transnational accountability, and the suitability of arbitration for the resolution of disputes involving diffuse interest and multi-stakeholders.

The edited book succeeds in what a first comprehensive treatment should do: it posits that ESG disputes are not about bringing new values into the law, but rather about how values already circulating in finance, governance, and human rights become legally actionable through familiar legal pathways. This proves to be a thought-provoking and timely contribution that will hold value for scholars, practitioners, and anyone wishing to get a sense of the quickly evolving dispute ecology of ESG.