GIGS: A THOUGHT-LEADERSHIP  INITIATIVE

The Global Initiative for Governance and Sustainability (GIGS-Initiative) supports research, education, and thought leadership on four aspects of corporate governance and sustainability for both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations: governance structures, sustainability, risk management, and ethics.

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Governance structures include both internally oriented and externally oriented structures. Within organizations, governance includes responsibility structures and the evaluation of responsibility.  Governance with its external environment includes both the organization’s relationship with its various stakeholders (such as investors, creditors, political and regulatory partners, as well as society as a whole) and its degree of transparency with those stakeholders. Globally, a variety of factors inherent to the business setting shape the effectiveness of both internal and external governance mechanism. Some of these factors include the following:

• Efficiency of local capital markets

• Extent to which the legal system provides protection to all shareholders

• Reliability of accounting standards

• Enforcement of regulations

• Societal and cultural values

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GIGS-Initiative aims to inform practitioners, standards setters, and national and international policy makers, and academics on the type of governance mechanisms required to curb value destruction and corruption, reduce inequality, and promote equity, diversity, and inclusion.

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With regards to Sustainability, competing frameworks, absence of auditing standards, measurement uncertainty, different measures of materiality, boilerplate language, and lack of comparability are challenges among others hindering the widespread adoption of sustainability reporting.  GIGS-Initiative aims to inform various stakeholders and be an active participant in shaping the future course of ESG practices and reporting. Our various multidisciplinary working groups will collectively address these sustainability challenges that are of critical importance to all the stakeholders.

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Risk management involves a systematic approach of defining the risk level that the organization desires, identifying the risk level that the organization has, and acting upon the challenges and opportunities facing the organization.  These include operational risk, model risk, liquidity risk, accounting risk, legal risk, tax risk, regulatory risk, reputation risk, and settlement risk.

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The ethical perspective of corporate governance includes both proscriptive and descriptive studies of behaviour. This includes the application of ethical theories to specific individual and organizational activities, either within the organization or between the organization and its external environment.

 

The GIGS-Initiative embraces interdisciplinary academic perspectives, research methodologies, and levels of analysis.  It engages in effective thought leadership, knowledge dissemination, learning, and its global network of regulators, policy makers, eminent experts, academics, and students. 

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