Publishing and defining sustainable finance and investment Matthew Haigh * Aarhus University, Aarhus School of Business, Fuglesangs Alle 4, Aarhus 8000, UK Q1 ¶ (Received 24 April 2012; final version received 24 April 2012) Provides an overview of the aims and scopes of journals and magazines publishing the outcomes of responsible investment research. Discusses interconnected terms such as responsibility, sustainability, ecology, financing and investing. Keywords: ecology; financing; investing; responsibility; sustainability 1. Introduction Journals and magazines that focus on sustainable financing and investment face pressing problems of aim and scope. How should journals publishing research on responsibility and related terms like sustainability define those terms? As important are questions of method, timing and the specific circumstances in which investing and financing activity can connect with sustainability and responsibility. Costanza and Roberts (1995) Q2 ¶ provide three questions they use to unravel the multi-aspect problem of sustainability: What system or subsystems or characteristics of systems persist? For how long? When do we assess whether the system or subsystem has persisted? These questions are likely to prove useful to considering the ways sustainability and responsibility articulate with investing and financing activity. This article applies these questions to the trajec- tories of two peer-reviewed journals that cater for researchers on sustainable financing and invest- ing: the Journal of Environmental Investing, and the Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment. The article closes with a description of other scholarly journals that have published research on sustainable financing and investing, as well as providing mention of special editions, collected anthologies, and subscription-based and popular magazines. Both journals under focused consideration are interdisciplinary and relatively recent. The Journal of Environmental Investing, which is sponsored by a Scandinavian energy company, is a bi-annual, open-access, online-only publication launched in 2010. The Journal focuses on, as its title suggests, environmental aspects of environmental investing. The Journal’s objective is one of ‘creating, deploying, financing, structuring, and managing successful market-based sol- utions to the environmental challenges of today’. Partiality more than impartiality describes a focus ‘to facilitate the flow of capital to solutions to problems arising from natural resource depletion, pollution, demographic changes, sustainability, and climate change’. The journal’s authors are practising rather than academic researchers, and have come from asset management, investment analysis, economics and policy. Recent issues have commented on carbon emissions permits trading schemes and the UN environmental programme. The journal’s aims and scope ISSN 2043-0795 print/ISSN 2043-0809 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20430795.2012.688797 http://www.tandfonline.com * Email: haighmatthew@yahoo.com.au Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment Vol. 00, No. 0, Month 2012, 1–7 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 TSFI688797 Techset Composition Ltd, Salisbury, U.K. 5/28/2012