Environmental harm is commonly associated with companies that extract, consume, and pollute our shared natural resources. Rarely are the 'unseen polluters,' the financiers that sponsor and profit from eco-damaging corporations, placed at the forefront of the environmental debate. By focusing on these unseen polluters, Benjamin Richardson provides a comprehensive examination of socially responsible investment (SRI), and offers a guide to possible reform. Richardson proposes that greater regulatory supervision of SRI will help ensure that the financial sector prioritizes ethically-based investments. In Socially Responsible Investment Law, he suggests that new governmental reforms should encourage companies to participate in socially responsible investments by providing a better mix of standards and incentives for SRI through measures that include redefining the fiduciary responsibilities of institutional investors to incorporate environmental concerns. By doing so, Richardson posits that corporate financiers, including banks, hedge funds, and pension plans, will become more accountable to the goals of ensuring sustainable development.

This book is about fiduciary law’s influence on the financial economy’s environmental performance, focusing on how the law affects responsible investing and considering possible legal reforms to shift financial markets closer towards sustainability. Fiduciary law governs how trustees, fund managers or other custodians administer the investment portfolios owned by beneficiaries. Written for a diverse audience, not just legal scholars, the book examines in a multi-jurisdictional context an array of philosophical, institutional and economic issues that have shaped the movement for responsible investing and its legal framework. Fiduciary law has acquired greater influence in the financial economy in tandem with the extraordinary recent growth of institutional funds such as pension plans and insurance company portfolios. While the fiduciary prejudice against responsible investing has somewhat waned in recent years, owing mainly to reinterpretations of fiduciary and trust law, significant barriers remain. This book advances the notion of ‘nature’s trust’ to metaphorically signal how fiduciary responsibility should accommodate society’s dependence on long-term environmental well-being. Financial institutions, managing vast investment portfolios on behalf of millions of beneficiaries, should manage those investments with regard to the broader social interest in sustaining ecological health. Even for their own financial self-interest, investors over the long-term should benefit from maintaining nature’s capital. We should expect everyone to act in nature’s trust, from individual funds to market regulators. The ancient public trust doctrine could be refashioned for stimulating this change, and sovereign wealth funds should take the lead in pioneering best practices for environmentally responsible investing.

The authors have done an excellent job explaining the development and practice of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI). Under the recent recognition of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Asia and its strong emphasis by US and European corporations, this book provides important guidance to students and professionals who are interested in the effects and implications of SRI. This book is truly informative and should be on the reading list of all fund managers and CFOs of international corporations which are serious about CSR. Louis T.W. Cheng, Hong Kong Polytechnic University Individual investors and corporate heads have the responsibility to keep abreast of major changes in the marketplace. Socially responsible investment is one of those changes. Fung, Law and Yau provide, in a single source, a great opportunity to get up to date on an area that will be a force for years to come. I encourage any thoughtful investor or manager to read this book. Thomas Schneeweis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, US Socially responsible investment (SRI) is becoming increasingly popular and can be potentially rewarding to all parties concerned. This book discusses the opportunities, challenges, and practices of SRI in a global financial environment in a consistent and integrated framework of risk management. It also covers a wide variety of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) issues related to various participants, such as values-based retail, institutional investors, corporations, banks, supranational agencies, and non-governmental organizations. Readers are provided with the perspectives of SRI from various players in the financial community from values-based investors to fiduciaries to supranational agencies. The authors analyse the incorporation of ESG issues into investment practices within a regulatory, legal, reputational, and operational risk management framework. Academics, corporate executives, government regulators and policymakers, bankers, and non-governmental organizations involved with sustainable development will find much of interest in this book.

This book advances an innovative, multi-jurisdictional argument for the necessity of company law reform to reorient companies towards environmental sustainability.

Sustainable Development in EU Foreign Investment Law offers a clear and convincing assessment of how the EU contributes to the ongoing debate on sustainable development integration in international investment agreements.

This book provides a business-oriented analysis of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). In order to assess their impact on businesses and corporations, the book addresses all 17 goals and a broad range of industries. Gathering contributions from Africa, Europe and Asia, it presents both critical reviews and case studies. In turn, the book seeks to predict likely developments during the next decade. To do so, it examines evidence from today’s business world and how companies and corporations have been adopting the SDGs since their release. In this regard, it discusses the changes that will be required and how the agenda will affect the continent’s development path. An underlying theme throughout the book is the role of monetary value and investment for sustainable development: whether through financing, enhanced turnaround resulting from a more educated population, or more socially innovative entrepreneurs.

This survey examines the vibrant academic literature on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing. While there is no consensus on the exact list of ESG issues, responsible investors increasingly assess stocks in their portfolios based on nonfinancial data on environmental impact (e.g., carbon emissions), social impact (e.g., employee satisfaction), and governance attributes (e.g., board structure). The objective is to reduce exposure to investments that pose greater ESG risks or to influence companies to become more sustainable. One active area of research at present involves assessing portfolio risk exposure to climate change. This literature review focuses on institutional investors, which have grown in importance such that they have now become the largest holders of shares in public companies globally. Historically, institutional investors tended to concentrate their ESG efforts mostly on corporate governance (the “G” in ESG). These efforts included seeking to eliminate provisions that restrict shareholder rights and enhance managerial power, such as staggered boards, supermajority rules, golden parachutes, and poison pills. Highlights from this section: · There is no consensus on the exact list of ESG issues and their materiality. · The ESG issue that gets the most attention from institutional investors is climate change, in particular their portfolio companies’ exposure to carbon risk and “stranded assets.” · Investors should be positioning themselves for increased regulation, with the regulatory agenda being more ambitious in the European Union than in the United States. Readers might come away from this survey skeptical about the potential for ESG investing to affect positive change. I prefer to characterize the current state of the literature as having a “healthy dose of skepticism,” with much more remaining to be explored. Here, I hope the reader comes away with a call to action. For the industry practitioner, I believe that the investment industry should strive to achieve positive societal goals. CFA Institute provides an exemplary case in its Future of Finance series (www.cfainstitute.org/research/future-finance). For the academic community, I suggest we ramp up research aimed at tackling some of the open questions around the pressing societal goals of ESG investing. I am optimistic that practitioners and academics will identify meaningful ways to better harness the power of global financial markets for addressing the pressing ESG issues facing our society.

Sustainable development, as defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development, is "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." More specifically, sustainable development is a process of change that seeks to improve the collective quality of life by focusing on economically, socially, and environmentally sound projects that are viable in the long-term. Sustainable development requires structural economic change and the foundation of that change is investment. In developing nations with low levels of domestic savings, investment predictably comes from abroad in the form of foreign direct investment. A large and ever expanding number of international investment agreements are in place to govern these transactions. While these accords seek to foster development while mitigating the risk involved in these types investments, many questions remain unresolved. This highly insightful book reflects the contributions of a variety of world renowned experts each of which is designed to provide the reader with valuable perspective on recent developments in investment law negotiations and jurisprudence from a sustainable development law perspective. It offers answers to pertinent questions concerning advancements in investment law, including the negotiation of numerous regional and bilateral agreements as well as the increasing number of disputes resolved in the World Bank's International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), from different developed and developing country perspectives. It lays out future directions for new treaty negotiations and dispute settlement proceedings, as well as ongoing investment promotion efforts, against a background of rapidly evolving international relationships between economic, environment and development law. It focuses on key issues in investment laws which have emerged as priorities in the negotiation of bilateral and regional investment agreements, and have been clarified through recent decisions of the ICSID and other arbitral panel awards.

This book analyzes the tension between the host state’s commitment to provide regulatory stability for foreign investors – which is a tool for attracting FDI and generating economic growth – and its evolving non-economic commitments towards its citizens with regard to environmental protection and social welfare. The main thesis is that the ‘stabilization clause/regulatory power antinomy,’ as it appears in many cases, contradicts the content and rationale of sustainable development, a concept that is increasingly prevalent in national and international law and which aims at the integration and balancing of economic, environmental, and social development. To reconcile this antinomy at the decision-making and dispute settlement levels, the book employs a ‘constructive sustainable development approach,’ which is based on the integration and reconciliation imperatives of the concept of sustainable development as well as on the application of principles of law such as non-discrimination, public purpose, due process, proportionality, and more generally, good governance and rule of law. It subsequently re-conceptualizes stabilization clauses in terms of their design (ex-ante) and interpretation (ex-post), yielding stability to the benefit of foreign investors, while also mitigating their negative effects on the host state’s power to regulate.

This book provides evidence on the relevance of environmental and social factors in decision making. It discusses the Gold Standard Frameworks for integrating extra-financial risks into the philosophy, culture, strategies, products and value chain management procedures of investment and banking and highlights the current emergence of global administrative law. New emerging topics like positive impact investing and finance, climate friendly markets, human rights, the enhanced role of fiduciary duties and shared values are approached with a lot of examples for practical application. Steps towards a new banking culture, a new climate for double loop learning and sustainable financial innovation are outlined and the additional benefits of robust stakeholder engagement explained. The anthology paves the way from robust impact and risk management to positive impact creation and a new investment culture. As well, challenges for the implementation and ways to overcome them are broadly discussed. The book is rooted in the fact that institutions and investors which fail to professionally integrate the management of extra-financial risk into their whole lending and investment chain and fail to move to positive impact creation may well loose positions and mandates and finally the trust of their clients, partners and stakeholders. The contributing authors of this anthology are internationally renowned experts in the field of ESG and impact investing. The compendium brings together practitioners and academics to allow a confluence of thoughts, concepts and viewpoints. This huge variety of perspectives and approaches makes this volume a comprehensive compendium on responsible investment and banking.