This is the second blog on our Symposium on Corporate Responsibility and Responsible Investment: Past, Present, and Future, held at Columbia University on May 7th and 8th. The Symposium brought together over 40 leaders from the Corporate Responsibility (CR) and Responsible Investment (RI) fields — including many of the pioneers and leading thinkers who helped shape these movements over the past five decades.
On May 7th and 8th, High Meadows Institute and Columbia University’s Sustainable Investing Research Initiative (SIRI), in partnership with the Corporate Responsibility Initiative (CRI) at the Harvard Kennedy School, brought together over 40 leaders from the Corporate Responsibility (CR) and Responsible Investment (RI) fields — including many of the pioneers and leading thinkers who helped shape these movements over the past five decades — for a Symposium on Corporate Responsibility and Responsible Investment at Columbia to assess where the fields stand today and what must change looking forward.
Donella Meadows, in Thinking in Systems, described how meaningful systems change occurs when interventions move from adjusting parameters to reshaping goals, incentives, and governing paradigms. The evolution of corporate responsibility (CR) and responsible investment (RI) over the past five decades can be understood through this same lens.
Over the past three decades, the corporate responsibility (CR) and responsible investment (RI) movements were developed in an operating environment built on a set of implicit assumptions:
Corporate responsibility and responsible investment transformed the language and institutions of modern capitalism. Why hasn’t that translated into change at the scale that matters? For more than half a century, the corporate responsibility (CR) and responsible investment (RI) movements have sought to reshape the role of business and finance in society.
Over the past five decades, the corporate responsibility (CR) and responsible investment (RI)* movements have begun to fundamentally reshape how businesses and capital markets think about their role in society. What began as a normative push for corporations and investors to consider their environmental and social impacts has grown into a complex global ecosystem of investors, companies, civil society actors, standards bodies, and regulators.
