The week
Five days, five deciders
Each day opens with a short pre-class commitment task in which students commit to a position in writing, and closes with a debrief against what actually happened in the room.
Day oneThe state decides
Public definition, and what happens to a market when a state withdraws one.
- What sustainable finance is forPurpose, mechanism, measurement, accountability, integrity. Each participant maps their own mandate and professional lens onto the framework before any doctrine is taught.
- Taxonomies and the regulatory architectureCompeting public definitions across the EU, the United Kingdom, Australia and the Singapore–Asia region — and what the market does when an expected taxonomy fails to arrive.
- Disclosure, reporting and supply-chain due diligenceHow the reporting unit gets defined, who assures it, where the boundary of legal concern is drawn, and where enforcement bites.
- The state as financier and as issuerDevelopment finance institutions, blended finance and guarantee structures; sovereign green bonds, where the state writes its own eligibility criterion and then issues against it.Guest
Day twoThe parties decide, bilaterally
Definition by negotiation, and definition delegated to a standard neither party wrote.
- Green and social loansUse of proceeds, eligibility criteria and reporting covenants. Who signs off on eligibility, and what a lender can actually do when the borrower's project stops qualifying.
- Sustainability-linked lendingKPI selection and target calibration, the sustainability co-ordinator's role, and the margin ratchet as the sole consequence. Students negotiate a term sheet and occupy the definer's chair.Exercise
- Environmental and social standards as outsourced definitionIFC Performance Standards, the Equator Principles and action-plan mechanics. Neither borrower nor lender drafted the standard, yet both are bound by it through contract.Guest
- Renewable energy project financeCut around the environmental and social covenant package rather than generic risk allocation — where the sustainability determination sits inside a project financing.Guest
Day threeThe market decides, answering to nobody
Private standard-setters, proprietary methodologies, and no external body positioned above any of them.
- Green bondsFramework, offering document and terms; the competing criteria of the market principles, the climate standard and the European regulation — and the absence of a green event of default.
- Sustainability-linked bondsKPI architecture and the structural loopholes documented in the empirical literature; and why the same determination behaves differently in a syndicate than across a bilateral facility.
- ESG ratings, second-party opinions and external reviewWho checks the referee. Proprietary methodology, the emerging regulation of ratings providers, and the terminal question in the chain.
- Carbon credit integrityCompliance and voluntary market architecture, methodology and validation, and the market's own attempt to build a verifier of the verifiers.Guest
Day fourThe investor decides, for itself
Maximum discretion, with fiduciary duty as the only real constraint on self-definition.
- Impact investing: the market and the backlashWhat separates impact from ESG in practice rather than in marketing, how the market is sized, and the current political and commercial retreat.
- Impact fundsPlacement memorandum, limited partnership agreement and side letters. Where the impact promise actually lives in the documentation, and what a limited partner can do when it is not kept.
- Impact measurement and fiduciary dutyMeasurement frameworks and operating principles set against trustee and fiduciary obligations — the constraint that binds an asset owner writing its own screen.
- The investor's screen in practiceHow a large institutional investor builds, applies and defends an exclusion policy. Paired with a fund pitch exercise in which students take the limited partner's chair.GuestExercise
Day fiveA court, regulator or claimant decides, after the fact
The collision. Every determination made earlier in the week gets re-opened by someone who was never party to it.
- Mapping ESG and climate litigationThe major strands of climate and sustainability litigation, including parental liability and transnational claims against corporate groups.
- Greenwashing enforcement and directors' dutiesThe regulator applying a criterion retrospectively and without notice; disclosure liability and the duty of care as it is now being argued.
- Strategic litigation and shareholder activismChallenging the board's own determination from inside the company — resolutions, say-on-climate votes, standing, costs and justiciability.Guest
- Complaints mechanisms and access to remedyThe one chain in the course where the challenger is an affected community rather than an investor, and where the process is deliberately not a remedy. Research paper wrap-up.