A Dignified Retirement Requires Climate Security
A New Theory of Change for Taking Action on Climate Inaction
Today I had a conversation with a consultant who specializes in organizational design, especially for not-for-profit enterprises. We talked about the important of values and culture in the design of enterprise, and the role of a board as stewards of the values and culture of their organization.
Pensions and Endowments are not-for-profit enterprises of a very particular kind. They are not-for-profit financiers. Their organizational purposes include owning money aggregated from others and investing that money to programmatically provide certainty against certain of life’s future uncertainties for their beneficiaries. The common law of fiduciary duty tells them what the values are they have to steward. They are prudence and loyalty to the beneficiaries of their governing charters of trust or other formative document. A core part of their culture, then, has to be determined by answering the question: Who are the beneficiaries?
This is not a trick question. The answer is as straightforward as it seems. For pensions, the beneficiaries are the current and future participants in the pension plan, each of whom is entitled to receive income security in a dignified retirement, after they do retire, whenever that my be, and until they die, or their participation in the plan is otherwise terminated, whenever that may be. For endowments, the beneficiaries are a little more varied, because endowments can be established for many purposes. But as a general rule the beneficiaries will include current and future students who receive scholarships for study, professors holding endowed professorships at universities now and in the future, and current and future grant recipients for charitable foundations.
The prevailing culture for all of these not-for-profit financiers is the future.
All of these different pension and endowments also share a common beneficiary, which is Society: you, me and all of us. Pensions and Endowments are social institutions created by law and supported by the law because they perform important social functions.
Society also exists now, and in the future.
So it seems logical to conclude the the values of all these social purpose, not-for-profit financiers has to include quality of life for their specific beneficiaries and for society more generally, now and in the future.
Which bring me to Bill McKibben. And theories of change for taking action on climate inaction.
Last night I Zoomed into a livestream fundraiser for In These Times, which describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit magazine dedicated to advancing democracy and economic justice, informing movements for a more humane world, and providing an accessible forum for debate about the policies that shape our future”.
https://inthesetimes.com/about
The Zoom featured Bill McKibben reporting on the state of action on climate inaction.
A number of things Bill said resonated with me, and I jotted down notes episodically, trying my best to get each quote right, although I cannot guarantee I succeeded each time.
The first thing I heard Bill said that struck a chord was this:
“It’s going to take getting everybody out of their comfort zone.”
This got me wondering, what it would take to take Bill and his colleagues in the climate action movement out of their comfort zone on theories of change, for how we can and should be changing how we engage on climate security?
Next, Bill shared how when he first got involved in the climate conversation, he “thought it was about winning an argument”. Since then he has learned that it is a fight, and that “the fight is about money and power”: “They’ve got money. We’ve got bodies. That’s the fight.”
That left me thinking, no, that’s not the fight. That is the theory of change Bill has chosen.
What if we chose a different theory of change?
What if we chose to partner with money, not fight with it?
What if we used our bodies to engage with Pensions and Endowments about their values and culture: how can they be good stewards of income security in a dignified future if the way they are investing today is helping drive our society into the very undignified future of catastrophic climate change?
Towards the end of his talk, Bill said “At this point, that’s what we need most. Leverage.”
What if that leverage can be gotten by collaborating with Pensions & Endowments to think through how these not-for-profit financiers can and should be doing their financings. They have a choice. They can choose Corporate Finance. Business As Usual. Or they can choose Bank of Nature. The Untaken Safer Alternative. Which choice is more true to their values?
After the Zoom, I looked a little closer into In These Times, and found this story they tell about themselves:
In 1976, author and historian James Weinstein founded In These Times with the mission to “identify and clarify the struggles against corporate power now multiplying in American society.”
https://inthesetimes.com/about
Four years earlier, in 1972, a new source of corporate power was being created by lawyers who were reinterpreting the law of fiduciary duty as it applies to the institutional fiduciary owners of society’s shared savings aggregated to programmatically provide certainty against certain of life’s future uncertainties through Pensions and Endowments.
Over the following 50 years, the language of Corporate Money and the logic of Corporate Finance increasingly monopolized these fiduciary owners for future generations, gradually and imperceptibly transferring their loyalties from our future to corporate power.
Today that monopoly operates largely unnoticed, and therefor unchallenged
The leverage we need to take action on climate in the time we have left can be gotten by breaking that monopoly, and setting Pensions & Endowments free to invest the Bank of Nature way.
Bill McKibben should be leading the charge to break that monopoly. But that would require us taking him out of his comfort zone.
How are we going to do that?