Call to Action

On April 7th, 2020, Dr. Gillian Marcelle led a Webinar on Expanding the Solutions Space hosted by Preventable Surprises and Ethical System and in which she presented: Innovation Possibilities in Times of Crisis: Covid 19 Pandemic.

Call to action:

The conceptual framing discussed in the paper Innovation Possibilities In Time Of Crisis and the insights and examples provided by Dr. Cathy Mae Karelse, Dr David Walcott and Mercedes Bidart, all have implications for the finance and investment world, not only from a system wide point of view but at a granular level, right down to individual companies. 

We believe that in finance and investment, the investment theses, portfolio construction and ideas around the purpose of finance matter.  These are not neutral and purely technical. The processes are informed by views of the world, ideologies and histories. 

Therefore, and particularly now, we ought to be designing  accountability frameworks that apply at systems level and within individual firms.  We the stakeholders and citizens need to have tools that probe, ask questions and deliver information about the theory of change behind investment decisions and demographics of the persons making those decisions. It should  be considered appropriate, if not an imperative, to establish the credentials of those mobilizing and deploying capital in terms of their understanding of the context and causal factors that have led to the world unraveling. The veil has been lifted and problems laid bare.

A purely technical analysis without ethics and political economy is no longer acceptable 

The Call to Action is to use the Covid-19 to widen the search algorithm used in identifying investable projects, making investment portfolio structuring decisions in public and private capital markets and then ensuring that the explicit and implicit rules in place do not reinforce lines of intersectional exclusion and injustice.