Simon Zadek
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Simon Zadek | |
|---|---|
 Zadek in 2019 | |
| Born | 16 July 1957 London, England |
| Citizenship | British |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Sustainability Economics Corporate responsibility Green growth |
Simon Zadek (born 16 July 1957) is a writer and advisor, focused on business and sustainability. He is the co-Founder and Managing Partner of Morphosis, an adaptation investment business. He was Founding CEO of NatureFinance, a non-profit organization aiming to align global finance with nature positive outcomes.[1]
Zadek grew up in London, later attending Bristol University (BSc Economics, 1979), he also has a PhD in Economics from Brunel University (An economics of Utopia: the democratisation of scarcity, 1992). He reports that the dissertation topic was rejected by potential supervisors at the University of Oxford and LSE, before he enrolled at Brunel.[2] Most recently he has lived in China and Geneva.
Career
Zadek has held a number of positions broadly concerned with supporting alternative economic development and sustainable business activity. Together with Julie McCarthy he currently serves as Co-CEO of NatureFinance. Before, he was Co-Director of the UNEP Inquiry into the Design of a Sustainable Financial System, which started in 2014 in Geneva.[3]
From 1979 to 1981 he was an economic planner for the Government of St Lucia, followed by a period of consulting with Coopers and Lybrand. In 1992 he joined the New Economics Foundation, becoming its Development Director and leading its work on corporate social responsibility. He helped to found AccountAbility in 1995, acting as its CEO from 2002 to 2009, and was Founding Chair of the Ethical Trading Initiative.[4]
Positions in academic institutions have included:
- Visiting Fellow at the University of Sussex
- Visiting Professor at Copenhagen Business School
- Honorary Professor at the University of South Africa
- Senior Fellow at the Centre for Government and Business of Harvard University's Kennedy School (until 2011)[5]
- Visiting Scholar at Tsinghua School of Economics and Management in Beijing
- Visiting Professor, DSM Senior Fellow in Partnership and Sustainability, Singapore Management University (2018)
He is also been an advisor to several green and business initiatives, including the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), the World Economic Forum, and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).[6]
Contributions
Zadek's early interests were in alternative, utopian, and Buddhist economics. But he became interested in the corporate social responsibility movement and particularity the development of social auditing techniques, when working at the New Economics Foundation (1992–1999)[7] and then as founder and CEO of AccountAbility (1995–2009).[8] Latterly he has worked on promoting green and responsible financial policies across the banking, insurance and investment sectors. He has developed environmental and social risk policies for banks and corporate clients, and argues insurers need to report their exposure to climate risks and their strategies for resilience.[9]
Recognition
In 2003 he was named as one of the World Economic Forum's 'Global Leaders of Tomorrow'.[10]
Zadek's book, The Civil Corporation: the New Economy of Corporate Citizenship (2001/2007)[11] received the Academy of Management's Best Book Social Issues Award in 2006 and has been called one of the most influential books on sustainability, by the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership.[12]
