Sustainability and Competition Law and Policy: Do We Need to Broaden the Concept of ‘Consumer Welfare’ in Order to Contribute to the Realisation of Green Transition?

Consumer welfare is a core element of many antitrust regimes. It is not surprising, therefore, that it attracts many of the tensions associated with the growing calls for competition policy to extend the scope of interests pro-tected by competition law to non-market values such as environmental protection. This article analyses the risk that antitrust assessments lose their objectivity and verifiability when they move away from economic-quantitative criteria to rely on more abstract parameters such as the contribution to sustainability goals. To this end, the reflection focuses on the discipline of sustainability agreements in the European Commission’s 2023 Guidelines on horizontal co-operation and compares this balanced solution with an alternative Dutch proposal, more daring but more risky.