The Carleton Centre for Community Innovation is convening an international conference this week on responsible investing through the UN Principles for Responsible Investing (UNPRI) initiative. The Principles for Responsible Investment, convened by United Nations Environment Program and the UN Global Compact, was established as a framework to help investors achieve better long-term investment returns and sustainable markets through better analysis of environmental, social and governance issues in investment process and the exercise of responsible ownership practices. 

Following the initial conference of the PRI Academic Network held at Maastricht University in September 2008, this conference will bring 75 invited academics and practitioners, including representatives from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Caisse de Depot, BC Investment Management Corporation, Toronto Dominion Bank, and Desjardins. Over the three days, twenty seven papers will be presented by a group of international academics, inlcuding ten papers to be presented by doctoral and masters students from around the world to encourage the next generation of academics on this topic. A special themed issue of the Journal of Business Ethics (JoBE) will take the best qualitative papers on Responsible Investing presented at the conference selected by the program committee and subject to the usual peer-reviewed process of the Journal.

I'll be blogging from the conference to capture some of the key themes and areas of discussion. Given the stellar line-up of respected academics in this field, I'd encourage you to download the papers and presentations from the conference. Many of these papers provide excellent reference material on the key issues around responsible investing, and indicators of how it will evolve in the coming years. Here's some of the papers that I'm hoping to be able to read through over the next few days:

• Sustainable Investing Principles: Models for Institutional Investors

• After the Credit Crunch: The Future of Sustainable Investing

• What do we do with the Business Case for Responsible Investment?

• Being Virtuous and Prosperous: SRI’s Conflicting Goals

• Future scenarios for screened responsible investment across asset classes

• Measurement Matters: Maximizing TOTAL Return on Responsible Investments in Private Equity and Real Estate

• Beyond Risk: Notes toward Responsible Alternatives for Investment Theory

• Effective shareholder engagement: An analysis of the factors that contribute to shareholder salience

• Responsible Property Investing in Canada: Factoring both Environmental and Social Impacts in the Canadian Real Estate Market

• Does it always PAY to be socially and environmentally responsible? Exploring the scenarios where there is a disconnect between Environmental & Social (E&S) performance and financial performance

• Structured Products for Sustainable and Responsible Investment

• A Social Movement Perspective on Finance: How Socially Responsible Investment Mattered

• Rethinking the link between corporate responsibility and financial performance

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