A Field Guide to Responsible Investing

For years, responsible investing has been a bewildering precinct in asset management. To many, the idea of aligning your values with your investment portfolio seemed naïve. Slowly and steadily, responsible investing morphed from a movement into an industry on course to command $50 trillion in assets by 2025— a third of the capital at work in the markets. And yet responsible investing has remained as difficult to traverse as ever. It’s drawn fire from critics who’ve branded the approach “woke capitalism” whilst more “responsible” generations of investors are poised to marshal trillions of assets of their own into the business - we are at an inflection point. As a responsible investing practitioner for more than 25 years, author Amy O’Brien has taken part in this revolution in asset management. With geopolitical conflicts, economic instability, and climate change fomenting unprecedented “polycrises”, she believes there is no more effective way to address the challenges of the 21st century than through responsible investing. Like most tectonic shifts in asset management, responsible investing has been complicated, hard to define, and hard to measure. But doing so is not only possible, it's also imperative. Over nine chapters, the book takes readers on a journey of the evolution of responsible investing, how it works today, why it’s integral to investment considerations, and how we can finally get a grip on its efficacy. It’s time to demystify and unpack this invaluable method for managing our assets, and our futures.