Has ESG Gone Off the Rails?

“When regulation starts to become coercive, then there is a problem,” an investment manager writes.

From the point of view of an investment firm that has taken into consideration environmental, social and governance factors for over a decade – with close attention being paid since our founding in 2006 to corporate social responsibility, e.g. good governance, anti-corruption and bribery, and “putting something back” into communities – I am becoming increasingly queasy about the direction of travel of so-called ESG.

In a previous article, The Parlous State of ESG, I lamented that what might have been a framework to encourage more ethical investing had become a bureaucratic nightmare of box ticking, supported by a ratings industry that has helped large investment management companies greenwash their funds.

It looks now as if ESG is becoming something much worse, because it appears to have been hijacked by social and environmental “activists,” in addition to the bureaucracy. 

Are there any other “ESG” investors out there feeling similarly disconcerted by this turn of events? 

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