Framework
The Imperatives for economic systems change
Three principles, one page, no jargon.
Between 2019 and 2021, several hundred organisations working on "economic systems change" tried to agree on what they were actually asking for. The result was a short list of principles, usually called the Imperatives. Stripped of the campaign language, they come down to three claims about how an economy should be designed. This page explains each one, the evidence behind it, and the honest objections.
Why a shared list matters
Movements that want to change how business works tend to splinter: some want new accounting standards, some want new laws, some want new ownership models, some want all three. A shared set of principles does three jobs. It gives everyone the same destination, so that different tactics can coexist. It gives outsiders a yardstick to judge whether a company is serious. And it makes it harder to quietly redefine success when the numbers are bad.
The three imperatives
IMPERATIVE 01
Design for interdependence
People, the natural world and the economy are not separate systems that occasionally collide. They are one system. Any design that treats pollution, poverty or instability as "someone else's cost" is a design error, not a side effect. In practice: price externalities, give long-term value a seat at the table, and stop pretending business, government and civil society can succeed one at a time.
IMPERATIVE 02
Invest for justice
Capital does not flow neutrally. Decades of research show that who gets financed, hired, promoted and insured follows lines of race, gender, geography and class that have nothing to do with merit or return. "Investing for justice" means treating that bias as a market failure to be corrected, with ownership, credit and opportunity deliberately widened to the people and places the current system leaves out.
IMPERATIVE 03
Account for stakeholders
What you measure is what you manage. If success is defined only as return to shareholders, everything else becomes negotiable. Accounting for stakeholders means measuring the value a company creates or destroys for workers, customers, suppliers, communities and the environment, reporting it with the same rigour as financial results, and tying rewards to it.
Where the ideas come from
None of the three is new. "Interdependence" is the language of ecological economics and of systems thinking going back to the 1970s. "Invest for justice" draws on community development finance, the cooperative movement and the research literature on discrimination in lending. "Account for stakeholders" is the modern form of a debate that runs from Adolf Berle and Merrick Dodd in the 1930s, through stakeholder theory in the 1980s, to today's sustainability reporting standards. What was new around 2020 was the attempt to bundle them into one agenda endorsed by mainstream business networks rather than activists alone.
What would actually change
- Corporate law. Directors' duties that explicitly allow, or require, weighing stakeholder interests. Benefit-corporation statutes are the clearest example already in force in many jurisdictions.
- Disclosure. Mandatory, audited reporting on climate, workforce and supply-chain impacts, so investors can compare companies on something other than the income statement. The European Union's sustainability reporting rules and the ISSB standards are the live test cases.
- Pay. Executive incentives linked to measured stakeholder outcomes, not only to the share price.
- Capital allocation. Public and private investors directing money, on purpose, toward under-financed people and regions, and tracking whether it worked.
The honest objections
Three criticisms deserve a straight answer rather than a slogan.
"It is just marketing." Often true. Many "stakeholder" pledges came with no change in pay, governance or reporting. The fix is not to abandon the goal but to insist on verifiable commitments, which is exactly what the third imperative is for.
"Managers accountable to everyone are accountable to no one." This is the strongest critique, and it is why the framework ties stakeholder accounting to measurable outcomes rather than to good intentions. Accountability to multiple parties works when each party can see the numbers.
"This is the state's job, not business's." Partly right. Rules beat voluntary action. But rules are written under pressure from the organisations they govern, and a business community that wants better rules changes what is politically possible.
Keep reading
- The RESET campaign of 2020: how the Imperatives were launched, and what has happened since.
- The network behind the campaign.
- Articles: responsible finance and wealth, decoded.