From 28 May through 1 June, McGill’s Faculty of Law, in collaboration with the Desautels Faculty of Management and the Sustainable Growth Initiative (SGI), hosted 35 Student-Fellows from eleven countries for the inaugural Transformative Business Law Summer Academy.
The Academy
The McGill SGI Summer Academy of Transformative Business Law came together in Montreal in May 2023 to address the multifaceted challenges that confront governments, business, and civil society actors in a context for which the clock has been ticking. The participating Fellows came from Brazil, Colombia, China, the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, the UK and the Netherlands, to name just a few. They came to spend 12-14 hours a day to explore, to question, and to analyze the existing conditions and obstacles in the way of transformative change. They brought their expertise in law, business, management, anthropology, environmental studies, economics, accounting, and political theory to shine a bright light on the present and how we got here. They displayed a keen awareness of the contrast between short-termism and profit maximization on the one hand and the increasingly vacuous phraseology of ‘global citizenship’ on the other, coming at a time when fewer “have” and many more “have not.”
Over the course of a few days, they were accompanied and advised by an equally interdisciplinary and international cohort of Academy Faculty. The Academy has been geared towards the elaboration of concise and to-the-point analysis pieces on a range of the most pressing contemporary political, economic, legal, and cultural challenges. They worked together in learning how to cut through the noise, distinguish between the polemic and the genuine, between truth and chatter.
The inaugural 2023 Academy met with a sense of urgency. It sought to bring together a number of key insights into the contemporary constellation in order to formulate what the Academy members hope to be constructive as well as inspiring, if sometimes provocative, suggestions of how to take steps towards transformative economic and societal practices. The Academy’s research findings and concrete recommendations are documented in the 2023 Academy Impact Paper, which was launched on June 1st, 2023, on the Academy website (https://www.mcgill.ca/business-law/). Simultaneously, the Academy posted a video documentary trailer on the work of the Academy on its website and on Youtube (https://youtu.be/zNiNkLTNmFk). The Academy is an annually recurring event and is convened in the hope to foster constructive and inclusive collaboration towards the elaboration of usable, pragmatic, and critical insights into the challenges of our time.
Climate Change, ESG, Supply Chains and Online Democracy
As the Report was written, we were again witnessing another sobering illustration of what the legal anthropologist Eve Darian-Smith calls Global Burning. Quite literally, wildfires were out of control near Halifax, Nova Scotia, as well as across other parts of Canada. Such fires are one example of Darian-Smith’s constellation of planetary deterioration which also manifests itself in floods and earthquakes, resulting in loss of human and non-human life and a deepening destabilization of the biosphere. These events add to the growing sentiment that much is ‘not well’, anywhere. Politically, election after election confirms the sobering trend towards authoritarian and populist politics and discourse. Authoritarian leader Recep Erdoğan was re-elected President of Turkey on the second day of the Academy, extending his rule beyond 20 years, while, in Canada, the outcome of Alberta’s provincial election might pit the province, home to the world’s third-largest oil reserves, on a conflictual course with the federal government’s carbon emissions and clean electricity strategies.
As around the world climate change regulations, diversity-, inclusiveness- and ESG- (“environmental, social and governance”) informed corporate governance and finance reforms are becoming battlegrounds for political confrontation, democracies are being put to a test. As David Cifrino of the law firm McDermott, Will & Emery and recently with Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative, noted in January 2023: “[a] preponderance of studies on the performance of ESG oriented investments suggests that indiscriminate exclusion of ESG investment strategies by pension fund trustees has the potential to hinder rather than enhance the financial performance of their funds and, therefore, impair the financial returns to plan participants.” Meanwhile, as of June 2023, the debate has only become more heated in the wake of a growing number of U.S. state legislators actively intervening against pension funds engaging in ESG-related investments. According to a Financial Times Report of 7 June, ESG-investments as well as ESG-related shareholder proposals in the first half of 2023 in contrast to the previous two years have been significantly losing shareholder support. At Amazon’s 2022 annual Shareholder Meeting, a whopping 87% of SHs voted against an independent audit of the company’s worker safety regime.
Today it is hard to ignore that the dreams of past decades of addressing planetary challenges – from poverty and hunger to migration, security, and inequality – through emerging infrastructures of global governance have been displaced by surging nationalism and an explicit discontent with a largely economic drive for globalization that can no longer be ignored. Examples of outright conflict, radicalization, and polarization abound, and the political “Overton window” for immediate and impactful responses to climate and other pressing social concerns seem to grow smaller each week.
The climate crisis today exposes a number of frightening if not debilitating facts. Not only does it challenge prevailing assumptions regarding growth and progress, but it also lays bare the exploitative and destructive dynamics of how the affluent relate to, benefit from, and discriminate against those that are vulnerable. Climate change prompts us to confront, globally, the unequal relationship between ‘takers’ and users, and between ‘makers’ and impacted, to pick up on pertinent observations made by the Financial Times’s Rana Foroohar a few years ago. We are past due in recognizing the injustice that what Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen call the “Imperial Mode of Living,” an unsustainable relationship of taking, not giving, of exploiting instead of collaborating and empowering. The U.S. American social theorist Nancy Fraser, a long-time thinker about the infrastructures and values of welfare state regimes, focuses in her new, widely discussed, book - “Cannibal Capitalism” (Verso, 2022) – on this constellation between the haves and the exploited, extracted, and suppressed ones She joins those – such as Carmen Gonzalez and Athena Mutua – across political science, sociology, anthropology, economic geography, labour economics and law, and political economy who have been tirelessly exposing the detrimental and ultimately destructive effects on the current way of life on humanity and the environment.
After ‘Global Governance’ – Which forms of political, democratic agency must be used?
In a context of deepening political fragmentation and important governance gaps, what is the role here of governments, businesses, civil society actors, and educational institutions? How – and, where – can collective action be reinvigorated towards a transformative engagement with the most pressing challenges we all face - together, on a planetary scale? In an era where elections in a region with faltering health care and shrinking public services are won with historically low voter participation on the promise of ‘carry on’, in an era where governmental leaders in those parts of the world with the largest GHG emission footprint vow in a populist gesture to defeat any climate change mitigation efforts, how are we to hope that the next generation does not simply turn inward and away from the vile, the noisy, the hostile? How can we look the surging post-pandemic mental health crisis in the eye and not despair over the shrinking spaces of innovative and transformative and, crucially, inclusive and empowering action? How can we not shudder at the blatant cynicism of a ‘return to normal’, when what the world needs is a collective, transformative coming-together?
Is there any role left for the University? How can it work better with civil society actors, with policymakers, and industry partners? How can it enhance a collaborative engagement in educating tomorrow’s leaders to do things differently, to turn the ship around, to be brave to ask the tough questions and to be even more courageous and tenacious to insist on the answers and their implementation? The Academy is but a small, small part in what is a much larger, global conversation and a collective undertaking. It is an honor to work with brilliant and alert students and colleagues, experts, clear-headed and responsibly thinking industry partners, activists and policy makers far beyond the University in contributing to this effort.
Link to McGill 2023 TBLSA Impact Paper: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4473822 // https://www.mcgill.ca/business-law/summer-academy/mcgill-summer-academy-impact-paper
Link to McGill 2023 TBLSA Video trailer: https://youtu.be/zNiNkLTNmFk
Link to McGill Business Law Platform: https://www.mcgill.ca/business-law/