Columbia University Sustainable Finance Seminars
SIRI leads the monthly (online and in-person) Columbia University Sustainable Finance Seminar. The working group sessions will focus on the identified pathways to consensus (including but not limited to system-level investing, fiduciary duty, and intergenerational equity) to drive forward the rewiring of the source code of capitalism and foster ecosystem-building. By doing so, SIRI provides an important institutional platform that brings together and fosters dialogue among a variety of key players from the public and private sectors, policy, and academia.
Following each seminar, a report summarizing the key insights and discussion points will be drafted and shared with participants. These reports will also be posted on this webpage accessible to companies, investors, and educators around the world.
Please join us for these monthly discussions and participate in the Columbia University Sustainable Finance Seminars.
Co-Chairs: Caroline Flammer and Bob Massie
When Visibility Changes Responsibility: Governance, Duty, and the Future of Sustainable Finance
Over the past year, the SIRI Sustainable Finance Seminar has explored the evolving intersections of sustainability, fiduciary duty, systems-level investing, artificial intelligence, disclosure architecture, and systemic risk. Across these conversations, a deeper question has repeatedly emerged: as systemic risks become increasingly visible, measurable, interconnected, and economically consequential, how might the governance architecture of modern finance itself begin to evolve?
This final session will address that question with presentations by three experts in the field, followed by an open discussion with leading thinkers in corporate governance, fiduciary law, stewardship, and sustainable finance policy. Together we will explore what it might mean if policymakers, investors, and governance experts began developing legislative frameworks designed to modernize American capitalism for an era of systemic risk and expanded visibility.
- What would it mean to draft a Systemic Fiduciary Responsibility Act, clarifying how fiduciary duty evolves under conditions of economy-wide risk?
- What might a Universal Beneficiary and System Stewardship Act look like if institutional investors formally recognized their dependence on the long-term health of broader economic and democratic systems?
- And how might an Integrated Materiality and Reporting Modernization Act reshape disclosure, verification, and reporting systems for a world increasingly defined by interconnected risks and AI-enabled analysis?
Rather than advocating for specific partisan or political programs, the session will function as a forward-looking exercise in institutional analysis, strategic foresight, and legislative imagination, drawing from examples of how governance systems have historically evolved during other periods of technological transformation, market instability, and expanding informational capacity.
Speakers:
Professor Cynthia Williams, the Roscoe C. O’Byrne Chair in Law at Indiana University, Maurer School of Law, will examine how fiduciary duty, corporate governance, and disclosure systems have historically evolved in response to changing forms of risk, knowledge, and market structure, and how emerging systemic risks may reshape future debates surrounding prudence, materiality, and stewardship.
Catherine Howarth, Chief Executive of ShareAction (UK), will discuss what sustainable finance reform looks like in practice, as a coalition of parties are seeking to advance significant governance and fiduciary reforms in Parliament.
Paul Rissman, the co-founder of Rights CoLab, will explore the growing tension between traditional firm-centered governance models and the realities of portfolio-level systemic risk faced by diversified institutional investors and the kinds of governance adaptations these tensions may eventually require.
We invite you not only to join us for the presentations but also to begin developing your ideas about how possible new legislation at either the federal or state level might address the intensifying contradictions within modern finance and governance. We believe this is going to be a particularly exciting way to finish out the Sustainable Finance Seminars for 2025-2026 and hope that it will lead to a renewed consideration of these questions beginning in the fall.