London Climate Week 2024: gathering the community

Community building is one of our three key workstreams here at The Transcap Initiative. At London Climate Action Week 2024 we brought together a local group of pioneers to explore some hot topics.

By Madeleine Lewis

The power of getting the right people together in a room cannot be underestimated.

Especially when the work is to reimagine the way financing is purposed, designed, and managed. To make money a transformative force in building a low-carbon, climate-resilient, just, and inclusive society.

It’s not easy work. So it’s critical to build and nurture a space that one of our community described as feeling like “they are not alone in rowing upstream and against the current”.

In an unexpectedly hot pub for London Climate Action Week 2024, we gathered a group of systemic investing pioneers to do just that. Here’s a taste of some of the key topics that came out of our discussions:

  • Recognising where we are. Despite how compelling this agenda feels to many people within our community, most investors are at the beginning of the impact journey. This is evidenced by both actual AUM, but also conversations that people in the field are having with their networks. We need new investment practices and instruments, but we also need to ensure we seed the next wave of asset managers who are fluent in systemic investing.
  • Facilitating interactions. The challenge of bringing together different types of capital – especially public finance, return-seeking investment capital, and philanthropic capital – came up again and again. We have to break down silos and create spaces to connect actors that need to interact (but don't necessarily do so on a regular basis) to really have a chance at delivering lasting impact.
  • Speaking the right language. We need to use language that these different actors can understand, and in some cases do the work of translation. We have to be able to articulate how our work fits with existing practices, rather than forcing others to understand and use our terminology.
  • Getting practical. We have to get into the nitty-gritty details of systemic investing and figure out how to engineer new investment models and bring them into the world – despite the fact that there is no guidebook on how to do that. This includes designing in justice, equity, diversity and inclusion effectively. (Watch this space for our Design Guide, which we’ll be releasing in stages from the Fall onwards).

We’ll be feeding the insights from these discussions into our work. Thank you to all those who joined us.

Do you want to collaborate with us?

There is an urgent need to rethink the way we deploy financial capital for transformative impact in human and natural systems. The field of systemic investing has garnered significant momentum, and now is the time to scale deep and scale out. So we invite challenge owners, systems thinkers, innovation practitioners, investment professionals, ecosystem shapers, and creative voices to join us in figuring out how to redeploy financial capital in service of a prosperous and sustainable future for all.

How is systemic investing relevant to

Foundation

...because the pots of capital operating under a philanthropic logic are orders of magnitude smaller than those operating under an investment logic, so systemic investing is a way for foundations to leverage their capital in the systems they care about.

Corporations

...because their supply chains are becoming increasingly fragile and societal expectations of business are growing. This requires companies to deploy all the tools in their finance toolbox (incl. direct investments, advanced purchase agreements, and supply-chain financing) and partner more strategically with governments, foundations, and NGOs.

Impact Investors

...because single technologies, start-ups, or social enterprises—no matter how ingenious their solutions and how brilliant their teams—are unlikely to change systems by themselves. So what matters is that these single-point solutions are synergistically nested within a broader systems change effort.

Institutional Investors

...because mainstream ESG investing doesn’t benefit places and communities at the pace, scale, and quality required, so institutional investors must channel more capital into real-economy assets in a strategic and collaborative manner.

MDBs and DFIs

...because sustainable development in a VUCA world requires portfolio approaches to systems innovation, and those need to be funded with a different investment paradigm than those dominant in development finance institutions today. And because the public sector cannot finance sustainability transitions alone, so systemic investing is a way to crowd-in private-sector capital in a smart way.

Engage with us

Which option best describes your interest in systemic investing?

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About

Who We Are

The TransCap Initiative is a think-and-do-tank operating at the nexus of real-economy systems change, sustainability, and finance. We operate as a multi-stakeholder alliance coordinated by a backbone team and comprised of wealth owners, innovation leaders, system thinkers, research institutes, and financial intermediaries. Our community is open to anyone committed to our cause and values.

Why We Exist

We exist to improve the way sustainable finance is purposed, designed, and managed so that money can become a transformative force in building a low-carbon, climate-resilient, just, and inclusive society. We believe that the key to accomplishing this vision is to inspire and enable investors to leverage the insights and tools of systems thinking and complex systems science for addressing the most pressing societal challenges of the 21st century.

What We Do

Our mission is to build the field of systemic investing. This means developing, testing, and scaling an investment logic at the intersection of systems thinking and finance. We do that by convening a multi-stakeholder alliance to develop a knowledge and innovation base, test novel concepts and approaches, and build a community of practice.

Our core ideas borrow from the disciplines of systems thinking and complex systems science, challenge-led innovation, human-centred design, new economic frameworks, and financial innovation. Our experiments are contextualised in those place-based systems that matter most for human prosperity—such as cities, landscapes, and coastal zones—as well as in value chains and other real-economy systems. We hope that our work produces knowledge and insights, methods and tools, and a self-organising community of inspired and enabled change makers.

The places and value chains we intend to transform act as centres of gravity for our work. In each of these systems, we will work with challenge owners, communities, innovators, investors, and other stakeholders to design, structure, and finance strategic investment portfolios nested within a broader systems intervention approach.

Learn More

Contact Us

TransCap Core Team
community@transformation.capital