Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) integration in financial activities is a crucial topic that is gaining importance in financial markets. During the years, many studies have been conducted about Initial Public Offering (IPO) and underpricing since they are fundamental aspects of firms’ lifecycle. Nevertheless, none of these studies have appropriately related firms’ ESG characteristics to IPO underpricing. In order to fill this knowledge gap, this thesis’s purpose is to investigate whether the ESG factors of a firm have effects on its IPO underpricing in the U.S stock market. The U.S has been chosen as it is the biggest stock market in the world and because of the quality and reliability of the data available for this country.  A quantitative study is applied to investigate the relationship between ESG characteristics of the firms and the level of underpricing. First, to obtain the measurement of the ESG level of the pre-IPO firms, we have conducted two textual analysis of IPO prospectus, namely, term frequency and sentiment analysis. These indicators aim to show the disclosure level of ESG factors and whenever ESG is perceived negatively or positively by the market. Successively, the multiple regression is performed for each ESG indicator to find which measures have the analytical abilities to explain IPO underpricing. Based on the multiple regression results, we can conclude that the frequency of environmental & governance terms occurred in IPO prospectus, the negative tone, and the overall sentiment of the environmental context are significantly explaining IPO underpricing. These results have given meaningful answers for our research. The market does not perceive the social factors of a firm in the IPO context. On the other hand, environmental and governance aspects still attract the market’s attention in different ways. The market is concerned about the disclosure level of the governance activities and whether these activities are sufficiently mentioned in the prospectus. Meanwhile, the market takes into serious consideration the environmental activities of a firm by assessing the qualities of these activities. Moreover, the market is more sensitive to the negative information about environmental content than positive information in the IPO context. The textual analysis methods applied in this thesis have some limitations. However, this study has the reliability to confirm that some companies’ ESG factors affect IPO underpricing. As a consequence, it is possible to state that the market cares about  ESG issues.

ESG och hållbarhet är begrepp som har fått betydande uppmärksamhet under de senaste åren och utgör en viktig faktor som företag behöver beakta. ESG, en förkortning för Environmental, Social och Governance, avser att mäta hur företag hanterar och rapporterar om hållbarhetsfrågor och dess påverkan på såväl samhället som miljön. Företag utvärderas utifrån dessa faktorer och tilldelas individuella betyg för deras arbete gällande de individuella komponenterna E, S och G. Betygen för dessa tre komponenter slås sedan samman till ett helhetsbetyg - ett så kallat ESG-betyg. Det har genomförts omfattande forskning och studier för att undersöka sambandet mellan ESG-betyget och företagens finansiella prestation - dock har dessa tidigare studier visat på varierande resultat. Teknologiindustrin är en snabbt växande sektor med företag som redan i dagsläget besitter enorma mängder data. Trots att industrins idé i mångt och mycket grundas i ett immateriellt tillvägagångssätt, har den även en märkbar påverkan på vår planets fysiska miljö. Denna studies första syfte är att undersöka hur sambandet ser ut mellan ESG-betyg och finansiell prestation, i form av både redovisningsbaserad och marknadsbaserad prestation, för dessa europeiska tech-bolag. Studiens andra syfte är att undersöka hur sambandet ser ut för de individuella E-, S-, och G-betygen och de europeiska tech-bolagens redovisnings- och marknadsbaserade prestationer.  Sammanfattningsvis visade studien att G-betyget har ett tydligt samband med både redovisad prestation och marknadsbaserad prestation, medan ESG-betyget i sig inte visade ett direkt samband med den finansiella prestationen. Detta understryker vikten av att inte bara fokusera på övergripande ESG-betyg, utan även att undersöka och analysera de specifika komponenterna i ESG-betyget för att få en mer detaljerad bild av deras påverkan på företagens prestation. Studien ämnar att bidra till en ökad förståelse för betydelsen av hållbara investeringar för både företag och investerare.

The ‡Khomani San people received lands in 1999 under the ‘restitution’ arm of South Africa’s land reform programme. Restitution laws, contained in the Restitution of Land Rights Act and the Communal Property Associations (‘CPA’) Act, seek not only to return lands to peoples dispossessed after 1913, but also to inculcate the ideals of South Africa’s dominant agro-pastoral-based society into defined, cohesive land-recipient ‘communities’. These ideals include centralised, hierarchical, representative, democratic leadership and decision-making structures that the West takes for granted. However, these concepts of control are not typically found among foraging or post-foraging peoples, who tend to base their societies on decentralised, small-group, egalitarian social structures that strongly oppose hierarchies, representation, or accumulation. Such social organisation remains intact even after these groups become settled or adopt non-hunting-and-gathering livelihoods, and today’s ‡Khomani self-identify as San, ‘Bushmen’, hunters, and indigenous people, despite their settlement and their adoption of varied livelihood strategies, including stock-farming. Among such groups, externally imposed governance structures tend to be viewed as illegitimate, and instead of the cohesion and order these centrally legislated structures seek to create, they instead engender dissent, conflict, and non-compliance. The ‡Khomani, as both a formerly scattered group of apartheid-era labourers and a cultural group of San people, have struggled with little success to plan and implement ‘development’, infrastructure, and livelihood projects on their lands and have ‘failed’ to operate the Restitution and CPA Acts’ required ‘community’ land-ownership and decision-making structures successfully. Thus, restitution has failed to bring the socio-economic improvements that the new ‡Khomani lands seemed to promise. Since 2008, however, the government has temporarily taken governance and approval authority from the ‡Khomani, which has led to the creation of smaller, behind-the-scenes governing bodies, as the ‡Khomani have begun taking the reins of power in their own ways. Such bodies, including the ‡Khomani Farmers’ Association and the Bushman Raad, have begun achieving some successes on the ‡Khomani farms in part, it is argued, because they allow the ‡Khomani to reproduce the focused, non-hierarchical, small-group structures that are more suitable to them as a non-cohesive group and more culturally appropriate to them as San people. The South African government, with appropriate protections for abuse of power, should provide the space within land reform laws to allow land-recipient groups to make decisions, govern themselves, and manage their lands according to their own community realities and their own conceptions of leadership and social organisation.

The global water crisis has often been presented as a crisis of governance and attributed to various factors, including the slowness of institutional adjustments to rapid structural challenges such as demographic growth, resource degradation and economic difficulties (UNU-INWEH, 2012). Despite the rapid growth of cities around the world and a fast increase in the use of desalination for freshwater supply (WHO, 2011), the dynamics of institutional change in desalinated urban water governance have never been researched. This thesis investigates the drivers, barriers and counter-forces to a major institutional change - privatisation - in the desalinated water governance of the coastal cities of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. Through the cases of public private partnerships (PPPs) in Abu Dhabi and Doha and the failed attempt to implement similar PPPs in Kuwait City, this research investigates the diverse forces that have led to the implementation of this new institutional arrangement in order to question - both empirically and theoretically - the literature’s general assumption that privatisation reforms in urban water services in the South arise from structural issues, e.g. a water crisis, an economic crisis and/or a governance crisis. The three main schools of comparative studies are used systematically to test hypotheses about causal relationships between selected variables. The structural approach is applied to examine the influences of the redistributive rentier state, oil price fluctuations and regional energy integration over the privatisation process. Adopting a Post-colonial perspective, the political culture approach is used to examine critically the contemporary influences of traditional cultural features, key local institutions and foreign cultural influences over the fluctuating roles of both the State and the markets in the local urban water supply since the late 19^th century. Finally, the rational agency theory is used to examine the role in the recent privatisation process of key political figures from the ruling families. This research demonstrates that the privatisation process of desalination units in Abu Dhabi and Doha was not driven by structural factors during the 2000s, a period of high oil prices, but was initiated in the 1990s and driven the following decade by the agency of a reforming elite wanting to privatize the water sector as part of a broader dynamic of construction of a neoliberal post-rentier economy – i.e. an intermediary political economic paradigm that aims to mediate the transition from rentierism to a fully liberalized economy. The political culture approach shows that these privatisations were facilitated by a gradual shift from pure rentierism towards a post-rentier form of neoliberalism in the political philosophy of liberal water technocrats on the one hand, and towards a regional trend of ‘pious neoliberalism’ (Atia, 2011) among practicing Sunni Muslims. Nevertheless, the enduring rentier mentality has constituted a strong counter-force to privatisation dynamics. The PPPs were implemented in Abu Dhabi and Doha because the local ruling elites situated the political bargaining within the tribal institutional milieus that they mastered completely through the control of the rent and related benefits. In Kuwait however, negotiations between the ruling elites and the leading political forces, the tribes and the opposition, were situated in a parliamentary institutional milieu that the ruling elite could not control and where the opposition and tribal MPs have opposed all reforms of the rentier ruling bargain. These findings illustrate that institutional changes in desalinated water governance are not neutrally driven by uncontrollable structural forces, but are the product of political bargaining between and among various rational political actors and their coalitions. This thesis also shows that in non-democratic or semi-democratic settings, the choice of a specific institutional milieu by the authorities is critical to the successful bargaining of institutional reforms, since it determines whether some key actors - along with structural factors (e.g. rent) and cultural factors (e.g. tribal influence) - will support the process or will be able to act against it.

People's narratives, interpretations and understandings of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline and pipeline actors emphasise the uneven exercise of power through which structural violence is effected and experienced. The complexity of the processes of structural violence along with local socio-political context and peoples' dynamic understandings thereof play major roles in shaping resistance practices, in complex ways in Kribi and Nanga-Eboko. Working from these narratives, I offer a theoretical re-articulation of structural violence as (i) tangible through the body, (ii) historically compounded, (iii) spatially compressed and (iv) enacted in a globalised geopolitical nexus by actors who are spatially nested within a racialised and gendered hierarchy of scale. Drawing from critical interdisciplinary work on violence, my theory of a triad of divergent, often interrelated and co-existing, distinguishable indexes of structural violence includes: infra/structural violence, industrial structural violence and institutionalized structural violence. The particular processes and mechanisms of uneven power within structural violence, local socio-political contexts and the epistemologies through which power is conceived (in this case I consider epistemologies of la sorcellerie, or witchcraft) inform resistance practices; I illuminate key operations (within geographies characterised by high levels of infra/structural violence) within the spatial practices of power that influence the tendency for resistance struggles to be quiet, spontaneous and/or labour-based. I conclude with a discussion of the political and intellectual value of academic work on life and being amid structural violence, emphasising the need to move beyond the invisible/visible dichotomy that has often informed intellectual work on structural violence.

Drawing on the case of Vienna, the article examines the role of third sector housing for social cohesion in the city. With the joint examination of an organisational and an institutional level of housing governance, the authors apply an interdisciplinary, multi-level research approach which aims at contributing to a comprehensive understanding of social cohesion as a contextualised phenomenon which requires place-based as well as structural (multi-level) solutions. Using a large-scale household survey and interviews with key informants, the analysis shows an ambiguous role housing cooperatives play for social cohesion: With the practice of "heme-oriented housing estates", non-profit housing returns to the traditional cooperative principle of Gemeinschaft. However, community cooperatives rather promote homogenous membership and thus, encompass the danger to establish cohesive islands that are cut off from the rest of the city. Furthermore, given the solidarity-based housing regime of Vienna, fostering bonding social capital on the neighbourhood level, might anyway just be an additional safeguarding mechanism for social cohesion. More important is the direct link between the micro-level of residents and the macro-level of urban housing policy. In this respect, cooperative housing represents a crucial intermediate level that strengthens the linking social capital of residents and provides opportunity structures for citizen participation. However, the increasing adoption of a corporate management orientation leads to a hollowing out of the cooperative principle of democratic member participation, reducing it to an informal and non-binding substitute. Thus, it is in the responsibility of both managements and residents to revitalise the existing democratic governance structures of cooperative housing before they will be completely dismantled by market liberalization and privatization. In contrast to other European cities, third sector housing in Vienna has the potential to give residents a voice beyond the neighbourhood and the field of housing. / Series: SRE - Discussion Papers

Institutional Investors own a large share of publicly traded companies, controlling a significant amount of the economy‟s working capital. These investors currently use little or no sustainability-related information to make their decisions, reinforcing a loop of increasingly unsustainable growth. This paper puts forward a new investment strategy that recognizes true movement towards sustainability and its link with bottom line benefits for investors: Strategic Sustainable Investing (SSI). To achieve this desired future, Institutional Investors must be able to recognize corporations that are strategically leading the transition towards sustainability. An Analysis Tool was developed to help address this need by identifying sectoral Emerging Sustainability Issues (ESI) using a consensus-based scientific definition of sustainability. Once ESIs are identified, companies‟ strategies regarding each issue are assessed. This Tool was scrutinized by a panel of experts in the financial and sustainable development industries, and was tested on three companies within the Unconventional Oil & Gas Sector in Canada. Results confirmed the usefulness of a tool that can recognize which companies are leading the sustainable development agenda, and identified the need for future research on the financial materiality of sustainability-oriented actions.

Thesis (MCOM.) -- University of Limpopo, 2019 / Responsible investment combines shareholder’s objective of financial performance with environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues when making investment decisions. Responsible investment has become necessary because most companies neglect the impact of their operation on the environment; society while focusing on short-term profits. Moreover, the collapse of big companies due to poor governance also demand that they focus on the need to strengthen good corporate governance. This study examines whether SA mutual funds companies listed on the JSE incorporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in making investment decisions. The study further examines the relationship between selected ESG factors and financial performance measured using ROE. A total of 28 companies where SA mutual fund companies have invested their funds were sampled and studied between 2007 and 2017. Secondary data was used whereby raw data was collected from the annual, integrated and sustainability reports of the selected companies’ websites and the IRESS database. Although many ESG factors could influence responsible investment such as climate change, waste and pollution, deforestation, working conditions, local community, bribery and corruption, however, some of these factors cannot be easily quantified. Hence, this study focused on one component per ESG factor that can be quantified. All these factors are required to have a deeper understanding of responsible investment. This study adopts the quantitative research method and adds to the growing number of studies by examining the relationship between independent variables represented by water usage (environmental), employee health and safety cost (social) and gender diversity (governance) and dependent variable which is financial performance measured by ROE. The Stata statistical software utilising the panel data method was used to analyse the data. The iii | Page study results show a positive and insignificant relationship between water usage and ROE, a positive an insignificant relationship between employee health and safety cost (number of work-related fatalities) and ROE and negative and insignificant relationship between the percentage of women on corporate boards and ROE. The results show that UN PRI guideline that encourages responsible investments is not followed by South African (SA) mutual fund companies. This study recommends that SA mutual funds companies follow the UN PRI educate different stakeholders as to the importance of incorporating ESG factors in business operations and the benefits thereof. Future studies can consider incorporating ESG indicators other the ones presented in this study.

With a growing risk of food insecurity in the face of extreme population growth, the world is in need of hands-on solutions that could combine a significant increase in food production while decreasing the effects of agriculture on the environment. Such a solution could be provided through cultivating staple crops in Indoor Vertical Farming facilities, however, due to its high expenses, these developments have stagnated, lacking financial support. As this financial support could be provided by Impact Investors, this thesis explores the relevance of non-financial factors and how they relate to the financial returns as well as how much it influences an Impact Investors decision to invest. The primary data was collected through a quantitative survey, including a fictional scenario based upon the cultivation of wheat in an Indoor Vertical Farming. The results were analyzed and interpreted through the lens of the Willingness to Pay concept and the Rational Choice Theory.The results showed that in the case of this study, the respondents were most willing to pay for the factors water, yield, and emissions. However, regardless of the positive impact of these factors, they lacked the influence to get them to commit to the presented scenario as they still prioritized financial returns as the base of decision. Lastly, another prominent driver behind the investors likelihood to invest was found to be age, where younger investors were much more likely to invest than the older respondents. / Med en ökande risk för livsmedelsosäkerhet parallellt med extrem befolkningstillväxt behöver världen praktiska lösningar som kan kombinera en betydande ökning av livsmedelsproduktionen utan ökad belastning på miljön från intensifierat jordbruk. En sådan lösning kan tillhandahållas genom odling av stapelgrödor i vertikala jordbruksanläggningar inomhus, men på grund av dess höga kostnader blir denna utveckling stagnerad på grund av saknat ekonomiskt stöd. I och med att en möjlig väg att säkra ekonomiska stöd kan tillhandahållas av Impact Investors undersöker denna avhandling relevansen av icke-finansiella faktorer och hur de relaterar till den finansiella avkastningen samt hur mycket det påverkar ett Impact Investors beslut att investera. De primära uppgifterna samlades in genom en kvantitativ enkätundersökning, baserat på ett fiktivt scenario om odling av vete i ett vertikalt jordbruk inomhus. Resultaten analyserades och tolkades genom perspektiven 'Willingness to Pay' och 'Rational Choice Theory'. Resultaten visade att respondenterna i den här studien var mest villiga att betala för faktorerna vatten, avkastning och utsläpp. Oavsett de positiva effekterna av dessa faktorer saknade de dock tillräckligt inflytande för att få investerarna att helt engagera sig i det presenterade scenariot eftersom de fortfarande prioriterade ekonomisk avkastning som främsta beslutsunderlag. Slutligen visade sig att en annan framstående drivkraft bakom investerarnas sannolikhet att investera var ålder, där yngre investerare var mycket mer benägna att investera än de äldre respondenterna.

This thesis addresses the critical issue of incorporating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations in the context of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) integration. As companies face increasing pressure to align their business strategies with sustainable practices, understanding how different MA integration modes can facilitate the implementation of ESG enhancements within merged companies becomes imperative. The objective of this research was to investigate the effect of two MA integration modes, absorption integration, and symbiotic approach, on enhancing ESG performance. Using a multiple case study approach, four MA cases from Orbis and Nordic Compass databases were examined. The findings reveal that the absorption integration leads to more efficient and effective implementation of ESG strategies compared to the symbiotic approach. The results contribute to the existing knowledge by highlighting the crucial relationship between post-merger integration (PMI) approaches and the improvement of ESG practices. / Denna avhandling behandlar den kritiska frågan om att integrera miljömässiga, sociala och styrelserelaterade (ESG) överväganden i sammanhanget av sammanslagningar och förvärv (M&A). I takt med att företag står inför ökande press att anpassa sina affärsstrategier efter hållbara metoder blir det viktigt att förstå hur olika M&A integrationsmetoder kan underlätta implementeringen av ESG-förbättringar inom sammanslagna företag. Syftet med denna forskning var att undersöka effekten av två M&A-integrationsmetoder, absorptionsintegration och symbiotiskt tillvägagångssätt, på förbättring av ESG-prestanda. Genom att använda en fler fallsstudieundersökning analyserades fyra M&A-fall från databaserna Orbis och Nordic Compass. Resultaten visar att absorptionsintegrationen leder till mer effektiv och framgångsrik implementering av ESG-strategier jämfört med det symbiotiska tillvägagångssättet. Resultaten bidrar till den befintliga kunskapen genom att belysa det viktiga sambandet mellan postfusionsintegrering (PMI)-metoder och förbättring av ESG-praktiker.