Divestment On Campus

Author : Laura Deeks
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (137 download)

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Download or read book Discourse and Duty written by Laura Deeks and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The issues of the size of university endowments, the role of institutional finance in a climate-conscious globalized world, and the role of responsible investment in fiduciary law all converge in the debate over fossil fuel divestment by university endowments. This article uses Harvard and Stanford's divestment campaigns as case studies to explore the discourse of the fossil fuel divestment movement. Taking a multidisciplinary approach in the legal constructivist tradition, this article argues that because fiduciary law and the specific rules governing divestment set the bounds of the possible in the arena of endowment management, the way the campaigners “talk about” divestment matters. This article posits that because endowment trustees must justify their decisions based on fiduciary law and the rules of divestment, the campaigners should ideally be aligning their discourse to fit the legal discourse of divestment if the trustees are their target audience. Using a combination of discourse analysis, a survey of campaigners, and legal analysis, this article examines several issues. First, whether campaigners seem to understand and exhibit a sophisticated approach to the fiduciary rules governing divestment decisions. Second, whether the campaign goals and discourse reflect a more managerial worldview aligned with the world of socially responsible investing and fiduciary finance, or a more radical environmentalist worldview unsympathetic to responsible investing and distrustful of existing political and economic institutions. Third, how the discursive choices of the campaign affect the rhetorical persuasiveness of the case for fossil fuel divestment and the opportunities available to the campaigners for furthering climate action in the arena of endowment management. The analysis identifies campaign discourse typical of both the neo-liberal managerial worldview and the radical environmentalist worldview. The findings suggest that protesting the fossil fuel hegemony and pressuring the government to enact climate legislation are the core campaign goals. It is argued that the political element in the campaign is problematic given the specific fiduciary prohibitions on politically motivated divestment decisions, with the more radical discourse minimizing the campaign's persuasiveness by chafing against the specific divestment rules (viz. the rules prohibiting politically motivated divestment, requiring “insider strategies” of shareholder engagement to be exhausted first, and limiting divestment to use as a strategy of last resort). The misalignment between the campaign discourse and the rules of endowment management may have arisen as a result of misalignment between the “real” goals of the campaign, its target audience, and the choice of arena. This discursive and strategic misalignment incurs opportunity costs for advancing climate action vis-à-vis the endowments and more generally. The final analysis revisits the goals of the campaign and argues that ultimately, if the campaigners are looking for radical political and socio-economic reform, they are unlikely to find it in the conservative realm of fiduciary finance. However, particularly given the moment of flux in the relationship between ethical investing and fiduciary law, the campaigners might find fiduciary law supportive of an alternative path to more far-reaching climate action than divestment alone can deliver, viz. through stronger portfolio greening and ESG investment guidelines spanning the whole of the endowment (as opposed to one industry). It is argued that if campaigners want to green endowments, their case will be stronger the closer it is aligned with the rules and discourse of endowment management.