| dc.description.abstract | Socially responsible investing (SRI) has since the late 1990s, grown to become an important concept in the global financial industry. This growth has mainly been led by institutional investors, such as pension funds and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) who, in the early 2000s, became aware of the necessity of behaving as real owners of companies and of adopting a long-term view of investing. As these investors started to embrace SRI, they steered the understanding of SRI away from the original ethical objects of the concept, towards the more loosely defined concepts of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. This development has resulted in that it today does not existing any universal definition or understanding of what SRI actually refers and how it should be understood. This thesis analyzes the responsible investment frameworks of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), the New Zealand Superannuation Fund (NZSF) and California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), and compares the three funds’ approach to responsible investing. The comparison is done by comparing the objectives and rationales behind the responsible investment frameworks, the actors involved in the establishment and development of the frameworks, the management structures and the SRI strategies that the funds apply. The thesis also discusses what can be achieved with responsible investing by applying the GPFG as an example. By doing this, the thesis contributes to a better understanding of what responsible investing represent to these actors, how SRI is interpreted across various contexts and locations in the word, and whether responsible investors choose to exclude the same type of companies. | eng |