Blog | CR/RI at a Crossroads: What’s Next For the CR and RI Fields

(Blog 6 in our series CR/RI at a Crossroads)

This is the second blog on our Symposium on Corporate Responsibility and Responsible Investment: Past, Present, and Future, held at Columbia University on May 7th and 8th. The Symposium brought together over 40 leaders from the Corporate Responsibility (CR) and Responsible Investment (RI) fields — including many of the pioneers and leading thinkers who helped shape these movements over the past five decades.

In my first blog, I summarized some of the key points made in the conversation on the current state of the fields and their impact. In this blog, I explore the discussion on the way forward from here. A full report on the Symposium is also being prepared and will be available next month.

1. Rebuilding Agency Through Narrative, Moral Authority, and Public Support

One of the most powerful and recurring themes was that the CR/RI fields became increasingly technocratic and disconnected from public values.

In seeking legitimacy within financial markets and corporate boardrooms, the movements progressively shifted toward highly technical language centered on ESG metrics, disclosure frameworks, and risk management. Participants argued that this came at the expense of moral clarity, public engagement, and broader societal mobilization.

The result was a weakening of political legitimacy and public connection.

Participants called for:

• Bringing morality back into economic discussions — reconnecting sustainability with fairness, justice, and intergenerational responsibility
• Framing the transition around resilience, affordability, energy security, and shared prosperity — not just ESG metrics
• Developing compelling public narratives that communicate both risks and opportunities in accessible language
• Engaging younger generations directly and creating stronger intergenerational leadership within the movement

A particularly important discussion focused on the distinction between values-driven accountability and rules-based compliance. Participants noted that while regulation and disclosure are necessary, the most durable accountability ultimately depends on internalized ethical norms and institutional culture — not simply box-ticking compliance systems.

2. Education and Intellectual Infrastructure Must Change

Education emerged as one of the most important leverage points for long-term transformation.

Participants argued that most business schools, finance programs, economics departments, and policy schools still largely reflect outdated assumptions about markets, growth, fiduciary duty, and corporate purpose.

There was repeated reference to how neoliberal economics achieved influence over several decades through coordinated academic networks, think tanks, executive education programs, research institutions, and policy advocacy. Participants suggested that CR/RI requires comparable intellectual infrastructure to shape the next economic paradigm.

Priorities identified included:

• Integrating sustainability into core finance and economics curricula rather than treating it as a peripheral elective
• Developing case studies of systemic failure alongside examples of success
• Expanding interdisciplinary research connecting finance, law, ecology, technology, ethics, and public policy
• Reforming academic incentive systems and democratizing knowledge creation

The discussion reflected a growing recognition that ideas, narratives, and educational systems play a critical role in shaping market behavior and political possibilities over time.

3. Global, Local, and Generational Perspectives Are Essential

The Symposium also highlighted that CR/RI has often been too Anglo-American in its assumptions, frameworks, and institutional design.

Participants stressed the need to engage more deeply with perspectives from the Global South, alternative governance models, Indigenous knowledge systems, local communities, and regional actors.

Several themes emerged:

• Different governance systems around the world offer important lessons that the fields have been too slow to recognize
• Cities are increasingly critical actors, particularly in climate adaptation, infrastructure, and economic resilience
• A growing bioregional movement is reframing sustainability around ecosystems, watersheds, and communities rather than simply corporations and markets
• Younger generations are increasingly questioning what the fields have actually achieved — and that scrutiny must be engaged openly rather than defensively

The conversation reinforced that future legitimacy will depend in part on whether the fields can become genuinely more pluralistic, globally grounded, and socially connected.

4. The Future Requires Collaboration Across Systems

A final and foundational insight was that no single institution, sector, or actor can drive the scale of transformation now required.

The Symposium reinforced the importance of networked collaboration across investors, corporations, policymakers, academics, civil society, labor, cities, and communities.

Key priorities included:

• Strengthening collective action among investors and corporations
• Building coalitions that extend beyond the traditional CR/RI community
• Pursuing engaged scholarship that connects academic research with real-world implementation
• Breaking down silos between finance, policy, technology, ecology, and civil society
• Expanding engagement with private markets as economic power increasingly shifts away from public markets

Participants also stressed that durable progress would require engaging constituencies that may be skeptical of, or even hostile toward, sustainability initiatives. Understanding those perspectives is not a compromise of values; it is a prerequisite for building resilient democratic coalitions.

5. A CR and RI Archive for Learning from Experience and Preserving Institutional Memory

There was also strong support for creating a living archive of the CR/RI fields — not simply as a historical repository, but as an active tool for intergenerational learning, field definition, strategic reflection, and future collaboration.

Participants emphasized that many important lessons, debates, successes, and failures from the past fifty years risk being lost precisely at a moment when the fields most need historical perspective.

The archive initiative discussed at the Symposium would aim to be global, multidisciplinary, multilingual, and practitioner-connected from the outset.

Overall Synthesis: A Profound Strategic Reassessment

The Symposium did not conclude that the CR/RI movement has failed. Rather, participants concluded that the fields have achieved significant institutional success — normalizing sustainability discourse, building disclosure infrastructure, influencing governance practices, and creating enduring global networks.

But the environment in which those strategies emerged has changed profoundly.

The world is entering a period defined by climate disruption, geopolitical fragmentation, declining institutional trust, AI-driven economic transformation, rising inequality, demographic pressures, and intensifying political polarization. Many of the assumptions that shaped CR and RI strategy during the era of globalization no longer hold.

The emerging consensus from the Symposium was that the next phase of CR/RI must:

• Move beyond incrementalism toward system-level change
• Engage directly with public policy, industrial strategy, and market governance
• Reconnect ethics and economics — values and value
• Build broader public legitimacy and democratic support
• Focus on resilience, accountability, and long-term societal stability
• Develop new intellectual infrastructure across education, research, and policy
• Strengthen collaboration across sectors, disciplines, and generations
• Strengthen collaboration between the CR and RI fields

Ultimately, the challenge is no longer simply making capitalism more sustainable at the margins. It is helping shape the institutional, political, and economic architecture of the next era.

The question now is whether the CR/RI fields can adapt quickly enough to retain agency and influence in the world now emerging.

This blog draws on discussions from the Symposium on Corporate Responsibility and Responsible Investment. A broader archive initiative, the SIRI Legacy Archive, is now under development to document the history, evolution, and future of the CR/RI fields. We welcome engagement and collaboration from others interested in contributing to this effort. For more information on the SIRI Legacy Archive program, please visit: https://siri.sipa.columbia.edu/content/siri-legacy-archive-and-symposium.

This blog post was created by the author with assistance from AI tools. All content has been human-reviewed and edited.