Manana Kochladze is a campaigner at CEE Bankwatch Network, an NGO that monitors international financial institutions active in Central and Eastern Europe. She is the winner of the 2004 Goldman...
Tarun Khanna is Director of the South Asia Initiative at Harvard University, a professor at Harvard Business School, and a member of the board of SKS Microfinance. Jayant Sinha is Managing Director...
George Soros is Chairman of Soros Fund Management and of the Open Society Institute. Photo : © AFP PHOTO / ERIC PIERMONT
Bill Drayton is chairman and CEO of Ashoka, the largest network of leading social entrepreneurs in the world. As a student at Harvard, Oxford, and Yale Law School, he founded a number of...
William Bourdon exerce la profession d'avocat. Sa spécialité : la défense des droits de l'homme. Il a créé en 2001 l'association SHERPA qui défend les victimes de crimes commis par des opérateurs...
Doctor of State in Economic Sciences, Jacques Attali graduated from the following prestigious universities: Ecole Polytechnique, Ecole des Mines, Institut d'Etudes Politiques and the Ecole Nationale...
Khadija Sharife is a South African journalist. She is also an activist and a scholar at the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and a contributing author...
Daniel Goleman est un psychologue américain né en 1946, Diplômé de Harvard en psychologie clinique et développement personnel, il a publié en 2009 aux Etats-Unis Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing...
George Monbiot is a well-known investigation reporter and columnist for the British newspaper “The Guardian” as well as a member of the BBC Wildlife magazine’s advisory board. He is also the author...
Dominique Bourg dirige le Centre de Recherche et d’étude interdisciplinaire sur le Développement Durable. Il enseignement à l’université de Troyes et à Sciences-Po Paris. Il fait partie du Conseil...
A celebrated ecologist, Paul Hawken is also an author, entrepreneur, government consultant and militant. He seeks to revolutionise the relationship between commerce and ecology. At the age of 20, he...
Social Investment Forum (SIF) is an association dedicated to the development of socially responsible investment (SRI). It encourages investment that does not only consider financial criteria, but...
Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) was created in the United States in the 70s when certain Protestant movements sought to exclude shares from the tobacco, alcohol or weaponry sectors from their portfolios. The SRI has changed a great deal since then. The most recent SRI funds consider extra-financial criteria in investment decisions. Today, instead of “negative screening” (exclusion of businesses from a certain sector), the majority of SRI funds practice “positive screening”: businesses are ranked according to their performance on a range of criteria, such as social, environmental and governance, which motivates businesses to improve their performance in these domains.
The SRI approach seems like an indirect but valid means to weigh future economic trends, taking ethical, social and environmental considerations into account instead of just considering financial performance criteria, as they did in the past. For the Social Investment Forum, a North American agency recognized as being a national reference in the subject, the SRI has encouraged changes in practices over the course of the last decade, thanks to the development of “positive screening” and to certain of these funds being aimed to help disadvantaged populations of developing countries.
Some people are a lot more reserved on the ethical matter of the SRI, like Paul Hawken, recognized writer and American militant ecologist. In his work “Socially responsible investing” published in 2004, Paul Hawken raised the problem of ethical rating. To make their choice, investors must compare companies on the basis of different criteria. The “SRI product offer” then rests essentially on the work of specialised ratings agencies who evaluate large companies by gathering and comparing diverse information. Paul Hawken regrets the lack of transparency of many of these agencies, who don’t communicate the rating criteria used, and the fact that the compared information lacks homogeneity.
In the work “Environnement et Entreprises, en finir avec les discours (Environment and Businesses, Done With Discourse)”, the authors Dominique Bourg, Alain Grandjean and Thierry Libaert also cast doubt on the impartiality of certain ratings agencies, which are sometimes owned by the same businesses they evaluate and that therefore have a tendency to “over-score”. According to the authors, ethical funds are considered by investors as growing “marketing niches” and the “shareholder activism” so dear to investors remains very limited today. The authors conclude that SRI has not yet ushered in anticipated changes in the financial sphere.
Rangoon, Myanmar : photo prise en juin 2007 d’un garçon transportant du ciment dans un lieu de construction dans la banlieue. © AFP
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