Hello. My name is Rob Van Tulder. I'm full professor in International Business Society Management. This is the area of management education and research that focuses on the way companies can create sustainable value for society. We look at the conditions under which organizations in general can finance and develop sustainable value on their own, as well as how they can do this in partnerships with other societal factors. This involves acts or what we call interface management, in which companies develop strategies together with societal stakeholders. We thereby distinguish between three basic institutional spheres of society: public, private and civic. Normally, these spheres are separated in operational as well as financial logic. Public organizations aim at the provision of public goods. They fund their non-competitive activities with taxes. Private organizations aim at the provision of private goods and fund their activities on the basis of selling products and services at a profitable rate. Civil society organizations pool resources to create social goods, which requires voluntary contributions to become a member of a club or a community. Now in the past, the separation between each of these spheres was almost absolute. But in a well-balanced society, each of these societal spheres also complement each other. Now, in the sustainability discourse, it has been found that each of the spheres is faced with some serious governance failures. So market failure appears because of the predominance of shareholders and short-term considerations in many operations of companies. Companies also find it difficult to cooperate with each other to develop new sustainable products. Civil society organizations find it difficult to organize citizens efficiently. Civic failure is also related to corruption and clientelism. Finally, governments are often the least trusted in defining the proper regulation or designing appropriate laws. Government failure in the sustainability discussion is generally related to so-called state capture by existing non-sustainable industries. In the middle of the society, we are even faced with a bigger source of failure, how to manage and finance the provision of so-called common goods. Actually common goods are those goods that everybody needs but nobody feels responsible for, such as addressing climate change for instance, or the appearance of plastic soup in the world oceans, but also pension arrangements or other issues related to our longer term health. This is also known as the tragedy of the commons problem. In other words, communities of cattle owners ruined the very foundations of their existence, which is a common pasture, by overgrazing. Now, to solve major governance challenges in sustainable finance therefore, it is important to address the sources of these failures. This can be done by addressing each of these governance challenges separately or by introducing new arrangements. Now interestingly, the sustainability discourse also showed that these spheres increasingly overlap. Companies invest in the provision of public goods or they try to reach yet unserved markets for poor people. Government-subsidized companies to speed up innovation. Citizens through collectives and crowdfunding for instance, creates social enterprises. The issue of sustainable finance does need to be attacked from all three angles of society. Along these lines, we can then distinguish different governance questions, and they boil that to two dimensions. First, agency, which primary stakeholder does the leader of the organization represent? Secondly, fiduciary duty, what type of societal responsibility is demanded in particular when looking at the kind of financial statements that an organization portrays? Well, we can distinguish thereby four tiers. On tier 1, you see AGG challenges that deal with primary duties towards financing owners. So that means that governments should act in the interest of voters, community leaders should act in the interest of their contributors, and corporate leaders should act in the interest of their funders, owners, their shareholders. But what does this entail for instance, for short-term or long-term interests? Therefore, tier 2 is important. Even when companies represent their funders, their owners, that does not mean they produce sufficient value for society. This challenge represent what we call the negative duty of organizations. So how to deal with the negative externalities that you create, such as pollution for companies, corruption for governments, or civil society organizations that exclude people for their own organization. So when we want to consider how organizations can not only limit their sources of failure and function properly for their primary stakeholders, but also aim at producing positive outcomes of society, we need to go even further. This is tier 3 and 4. We call this the positive duty of organizations or the challenge of creating positive externalities, like common pool provisions. You can see in the triangle that here the societal spheres more and more overlap. The more spheres overlap, the more they potentially can serve the needs of the whole society. In particular, sustainable needs that materialize over the longer run can be served. But the bigger the overlap, of course the bigger the governance challenge become. How to define, for instance, the proper purpose of an organization, as well as how to define proper financing models for these hybrid forms of organizing. The societal challenge has also been addressed by another form of organizational hybridization, as we call it. We find have all interesting organizational forms that cannot be positioned in the three corners of society, like family-owned enterprises, social enterprises, state-owned enterprises, hospitals, universities, public private partnerships, public utility providers, foundations. They're often better positioned to serve societal needs at tiers 2, 3 and 4. So assessing their effectiveness in terms of agency and duties is rather complex, but not less important. In most countries, these intermediary forms represent often more than 80 percent of the national economy, and that is not by accident. They were very often created to address societal issues. So try to take some of the societal complexity you need to account when you look at the governance conditions for sustainable finance. Hybrid forms often provide better results and actually are prevalent in society. This short talk is not the place to dwell on this challenge in more detail. You can find an elaborate version of these ideas on my website in the paper written with a colleague of mine entitled Responsible Governance. In any case, I wish you good luck.
