Entrepreneurship in the territories: is it the right time?
Job Description
This newly created role will be responsible for contributing to Spring, PRI’s new stewardship initiative for nature. Spring is a PRI stewardship initiative for nature, convening institutional investors to use their influence to halt and reverse biodiversity loss across the globe by 2030. Spring aims to address the systemic risk of nature loss to societies and secure long-term value creation by enhancing corporate practices, ultimately generating positive, real-world outcomes. In its first phase, Spring focuses on forest loss and land degradation in priority geographies, and on responsible political engagement by companies. We also seek to support the work of other stewardship initiatives on nature, as we recognise the need for multiple approaches to create a sustainable future.
This position sits within the PRI’s Stewardship Initiatives team, which is responsible for facilitating collaborative investor engagement activities on key environmental, social and governance issues.
Stewardship is one of the most powerful mechanisms by which investors and their agents can contribute to the achievement of the PRI’s mission: the creation of a sustainable financial system which benefits the environment and society as a whole. The role is an exciting opportunity to contribute to work that will encourage and enable PRI signatories to fully realise the potential of stewardship to drive real-world outcomes on topics that are part of the broader nature agenda.
The primary responsibilities for this role will be to coordinate and support ~15-20 company engagements and to be a point person for all of Spring’s activities in the APAC region. Spring will facilitate small groups of PRI signatories who in turn will use engagement and other stewardship tools to positively influence companies across a range of sectors to address forest loss, land degradation and other environmental issues.
The role reports to PRI’s Head of Stewardship, Nature and will involve extensive collaboration with the PRI colleagues working on Spring, as well as PRI’s sustainability team – in particular the Climate and Environment team – who are responsible for issue expertise on nature-related topics
Core Responsibilities:
Engagement coordination
- Support the coordination of the Spring investor working group and investor-company dialogue.
- Coordinate engagement groups relating to 15-20 companies. Convene and facilitate regular engagement group meetings/calls to track the progress of engagements, discuss issues and share information.
- Conduct and/or disseminate relevant company/ sector/ policy research, guidance, and other analysis for investors to use in company engagements both within and beyond Spring.
- Manage and/or contribute to initiative-wide projects, such as signatory accountability, webinars and events, tracking and progress report, etc.
- Organise and support (regional) educational sessions on relevant topics.
External representation
- Act as an initial point of contact for participating signatories in the APAC region. Build relationships with investors to maintain and expand expertise of engagement practices, best practices and needs.
- Build relationships with stakeholders in the nature space to inform investors’ expectations and create channels of communication between the investor group and relevant stakeholders and technical experts.
- Speak publicly at regional events, both digital and in person, to senior-level stakeholders on Spring, on stewardship and the PRI’s work more generally.
Internal processes
- Manage and/or contribute to other initiative-wide projects (as needed), such as sector work/research, signatory accountability, webinars, progress report, etc.
- Work to identify and implement improvements to PRI coordination of collaborative engagement processes, including shareholder resolutions and the role of proxy voting.
- Work closely with other PRI engagement staff to ensure that various initiatives (both inside and outside of PRI) are aligned and coordinated.
- Proactively share knowledge with other PRI stewardship staff on lessons learned from past and ongoing engagement efforts.
- Be responsive to feedback from PRI colleagues, signatories and other stakeholders, proactively following up to ensure any issues are resolved. Engage with colleagues to gain a broader understanding of issues and seek to respond to or resolve them.
- Independently deliver well-structured, logical presentations, recommendations and outputs that deliver maximum impact with minimum editing.
