Sustainable Banking introduces business leaders and students to the many ways in which financial institutions can manage their environmental and social impact and meet the needs of the current generation without compromising the needs of future generations. Olaf Weber and Blair Feltmate go beyond the business case for sustainability: how managing environmental, social, and governance risk can contribute to a bank’s bottom line – to make the sustainability case for banking: how ban...

Green finance is heralded in theory and practice as the new panacea – the ideal way to support the green transition of businesses into more sustainable, environmentally responsible forms, by means of incentivized financial investments. This handbook brings together a variety of expert scholars with industry specialists to offer the most authoritative overview of green finance to date, presenting the current situation in the field. It focuses on green finance in a comprehensive way, discuss...

Social Banking describes a way of value-driven banking that has a positive social and ecological impact at its heart, as well as its own economic sustainability. Although it has a long and successful history, it has arguably never been more topical than it is now in the aftermath of the latest financial crisis. Most Social Banks came out of this crisis not only unscathed but much stronger and bigger than they were before. And contrary to their conventional peers, none of the Social Banks h...

This book tells the story of how the convergence between corporate sustainability and sustainable investing is now becoming a major force driving systemic market changes. The idea and practice of corporate sustainability is no longer a niche movement. Investors are increasingly paying attention to sustainability factors in their analysis and decision-making, thus reinforcing market transformation.In this book, high-level practitioners and academic thought leaders, including contrib...

An in-depth look at the trouble with shareholder value thinking and at better options for models of corporate purpose.Executives, investors, and the business press routinely chant the mantra that corporations are required to "maximize shareholder value." In this pathbreaking book, renowned corporate expert Lynn Stout debunks the myth that corporate law mandates shareholder primacy. Stout shows how shareholder value thinking endangers not only investors but the rest ...

The behavior of managers-such as the rewards they obtain for poor performance, the role of boards of directors in monitoring managers, and the regulatory framework covering the corporate governance mechanisms that are put in place to ensure managers' accountability to shareholder and other stakeholders-has been the subject of extensive media and policy scrutiny in light of the financial crisis of the early 2000s. However, corporate governance covers a much broader set of issues, which requ...

Should business and finance play larger roles in resolving the great social and environmental challenges of our time? Proponents of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing say yes. They argue that ESG financial strategies can help reverse runaway carbon emissions and fix income and gender inequalities, among other ills. ESG-integrated investments already encompass more than $120 trillion in financial assets. Are they working as promised? If not, how can they be improved?...

Each year we pay billions in fees to those who run our financial system. The money comes from our bank accounts, our pensions, our borrowing, and often we aren’t told that the money has been taken. These billions may be justified if the finance industry does a good job, but as this book shows, it too often fails us. Financial institutions regularly place their business interests first, charging for advice that does nothing to improve performance, employing short-term buying strategies th...

This book aims to provide scholars, students and practitioners with a broad analysis – both theoretical and practical – of what it means to be a sustainable bank. It provides a comprehensive overview of sustainable banking literature and practices, discussing environmental and social pressures. The book is organized into seven chapters, of which two are dedicated to practical case studies and analysis. The book features up-to-date academic literature, a broad overview on new sustainable ba...

After the crisis of 2008, the social contract between the financial industry and everyone else was badly broken-perhaps, it seemed, irrevocably. Since then, banks have paid out billion-dollar settlements and Congress has passed some new laws, but a deeper rapprochement is still missing. John Taft has gathered some of the greatest financial minds of our time to explore how Wall Street can harness the same creative energy that invented credit default swaps and channel it towards the public g...

Giving voice to the marginalized, broadly defined, is the aim of this volume in its examination of social life increasingly marked by global inequality and the extension of market rationalities to all arenas. Revealing the outcome to populations, stakeholders, and the environment when policies resting on narrowly constrained logics are employed, these researchers lead the way in probing accountings participation in significant struggles of our times. In order to better appreciate the conse...

For some, finance is the enemy: solely responsible for the global financial crisis and symbolic of an outdated model that is catapulting us toward social and ecological ruin. Such a view can seem tempting. The 2007-2008 meltdown of the financial system was intimately bound to the financialization of the economy and its consequences. However, in reality the crisis in finance is an indicator that our economic model is obsolete. It is possible to imagine another way, which would consist of se...