友成@YouChange

创造社会和环境影响的投资-报告概要

Monday, 03. 23. 2009  –  Category: 推荐阅读

Investing for social and environmental impact

Completed in January 2009 by Monitor Institute, with lead
funding and support from the Rockefeller Foundation. Funding
was also provided by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, W.K. Kellogg
Foundation and JPMorgan Chase Foundation.

WHAT IS IMPACT INVESTING?

In New York City, a low-income mother is moving into an apartment on land developed with a loan from the New York City Acquisition Fund. The Fund, created in 2004, aims to facilitate the construction of 10,000 units of affordable housing in a city with rapidly diminishing affordable housing stock. The Fund came together when private foundations made $32 million in low-interest, subordinated loans and a city-based charitable trust invested $8 million on similar terms, enabling commercial banks to raise and place more than $160 million of commercially priced debt into the fund.
In rural Tanzania, a student is reading at home by the light of an electric light bulb powered by a solar panel her mother bought on credit from a local distributor. The distribution business could reach her village because of an equity and working capital investment made by E+Co, a nonprofit mezzanine fund focused on making debt and equity investments in businesses that develop and sell modern energy services.
In Cambodia, a small business is expanding with debt from a microfinance bank. The bank is originating new loans after accessing commercial capital markets through a $110 million loan fund structured in 2007 by Blue Orchard, a Swiss microfinance-focused asset management company, and Morgan Stanley. The loan fund, rated by Standard & Poor’s, was syndicated on commercial terms among institutional investors, such as pension funds, in Europe and the United Kingdom.
The New Yorker moving into her first home, the student in Tanzania studying
under electric light, the small-business owner in Cambodia expanding her payroll—none of these people would recognize one another as co-participants in the same emerging industry. Neither, perhaps, would the commercial banker placing debt in the Acquisition Fund, the high-net-worth individuals investing in E+Co, or the German worker whose pension fund invested in microfinance through Blue Orchard.
Yet these are all examples of the proliferation of activity occurring as a new industry of impact investing emerges. This industry which involves making investments that generate social and environmental value as well as financial return, has the potential to complement philanthropy and government
intervention as a potent force for addressing global challenges at scale. This document is intended to shed light on the industry’s recent emergence and highlight the challenges it faces in achieving its promise.

SUMMARY: PROMISE, PERIL, AND PRECISION

There are moments in history when the needs of an age prompt lasting, positive innovation in finance—from ideas as big as the
invention of money, to the creation of new institutions such as banks and insurance firms, to the development of new products and services such as mortgages, pensions, and mutual funds.

Evidence suggests that many thousands of people and institutions around the globe believe our era needs a new type of investing. They are already experimenting with it, and many of them continue even in the midst of a financial and credit crisis. That’s why the idea of using profit-seeking investment to generate social and environmental good is moving from a periphery of activist investors to the core of mainstream financial institutions.

No one can know for sure how much money has been invested or is seeking investment that generates both social and environmental value as well as financial return. But a good guess is that the total size of the market could be as big as $500 billion within the next decade.

These impact investors want to move beyond “socially responsible investment,” which focuses primarily on avoiding investments in “harmful” companies or encouraging improved corporate practices related to the environment, social performance, or governance. Instead, they actively seek to place capital in businesses and funds that can provide solutions at a scale that purely philanthropic interventions usually cannot reach. This capital may be in a range of forms including equity, debt, working capital lines of credit, and loan guarantees. Examples in recent decades include many microfinance, community development finance, and clean technology investments.

What’s most interesting today, though, isn’t identifying this new promise. Rather, we will argue that this moment is a messy transition—made even messier by 2008’s financial crisis—in an evolution of activity that is already several decades old. How this transition is traversed, and how quickly, will determine the scale and ultimate impact that this new domain of investing can and will have.

The pressing question is whether impact investing will remain a small, disorganized, underleveraged niche for years or even decades to come—or whether leaders will come together to fulfill the industry’s clear promise, making this new domain a major complementary force for providing the capital, talent, and creativity needed to address pressing social and environmental challenges.

The pressing question is whether impact investing will remain a small, disorganized, underleveraged niche for years or even decades to come.

Our premise is that there is only one acceptable answer. It matters a great deal that more of our era’s assets are used to address some of its most troubling challenges.
Prompted by this question and this premise, in the spring of 2008 we began to explore
what the future of this style of impact investing might be. We spent the rest of the year—in close partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, and supported
with additional funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation—engaging in the interviews, research, and dialogues that have resulted in this report. It’s been a fascinating time, not least because of the backdrop of the global financial market crisis that unfolded over the course of the project.
The point of view expressed here was formed after extensive scouring of existing studies and research as well as a convening of 45 investors and intermediaries interested
or engaged in investing for impact. It reflects more than 50 original interviews conducted with a range of investors—including private individuals, family offices, investment banks, institutional investors, foundations, and pension funds—about their experience with investing for impact, how they think it may evolve, and what will best accelerate its evolution. While no one can predict with certainty how the global economic markets will evolve, we have sought through these dialogues to understand the potential implications of 2008’s financial crisis on impact investing.
Our analysis shows that two types of peril will need to be confronted explicitly to seize the promise inherent in the current transition for impact investing:
• The risk that investing for impact will ultimately be too hard. Here, hype, poor thinking, and sloppy execution would cause so much disappointment that relatively little capital would wind up in this new style of investing. The will to overcome the typical challenges facing a messy, new industry could disappear as investors simply give up too soon, especially in the face of strong macroeconomic
head winds.
• The risk that investing for impact will ultimately be too easy. Here, the definition
of social and environmental impact could turn out to be so loose and diluted as to be virtually meaningless. At best, this outcome would turn this type of investing into a “feel good” rather than a “do good” exercise. At worst, it could actually divert capital away from philanthropy, decreasing the resources dedicated to confronting serious societal challenges.
Successfully confronting these risks will require leaders and investors to insist on precision—on sustained rigor and reflection—in the midst of genuine excitement and good intentions. Such scrutiny would be necessary even without global financial fragility. But the travails triggered by the sub-prime credit crisis are a reminder that investing well is hard in any circumstances and wishful thinking is not a strategy for confronting real risks.
We will argue here that the precision most needed in the years ahead requires confronting a paradox: impact investing is both one thing, and many things. This moment of transition requires leaders to build the collective will that can only come from seeing the common whole that is emerging from diverse elements in this emerging industry. But at the same time, what is needed to accelerate progress is the ability to separate and make distinctions, so that action is meaningful on the ground.
Our purpose is neither to celebrate nor to simply warn of the dangers ahead. Instead, we hope to lay out what it would mean to set the bar high enough—to advance this emerging industry systematically, with demonstrable impact on urgent
social and environmental issues.
Our focus on impact investing is in no way a diminution of the critical role of philanthropy or a view that impact investing can and should broadly supplant it. These times remind us how easy it is to slide into market triumphalism—where we lapse into the sloppy (and incorrect) thinking that investment and market mechanisms
are the solutions to all our problems. However, the magnitude and nature of the problems humanity faces also require the harnessing of additional investment capital.
This report has been designed as a guide for the innovative leaders who can accelerate
the progress of impact investing—investors, advisors to investors, entrepreneurs, philanthropists. It summarizes our findings about:
• The current state and shape of the industry at a critical moment in its development—so you can locate yourself in the current landscape, reflect on its opportunities and challenges, and understand what has catalyzed other industries at this phase of evolution
• How impact investing might evolve—so you can develop an understanding of what the future may hold, including the promise and tradeoffs of pursuing
different strategies
• An approach for accelerating the growth and impact of this style of investing—so you can assess what you can do to seize the business opportunities inherent in it and understand what could be achieved by joining with others
• A call to action—so you can understand the importance of the moment and can develop a concrete sense of what success in building a marketplace for impact investing might look like in the months and years ahead
We will also try to bring the diversity within impact investing to life through
examples and profiles of people engaged in doing it.

Tags: Social Innovation, Social Investment 社会投资, 社会价值, 社会企业