By Michael Ryland, President of GAIL, Asia Pacific Board Member

Looking ahead

As I put pen to paper for this column, the Mexico Summit is less than 3 weeks away.  There is still time to register and you won’t regret it. The LATAM team has put together a stellar set of sessions!  I am looking forward to it immensely.

Looking forward to the Summit has prompted me to pick up in this column the theme of “looking ahead”.  What is ahead for Impact law?  What should Impact lawyers be thinking about and planning for?  Where are the challenges and the opportunities?

There are many angles to this theme. The most front-of-mind issue is how will changing political and economic conditions affect Impact law?  The short answer is that they will affect it in lots of ways but much of that is the choppy surface of the sea. 

Beyond that surface are longer term questions: what are the growing areas of learning in Impact law? What kinds of connections and platforms need to be built to help Impact lawyers achieve outcomes?  What kind of career choices can be created to make Impact law and practice an integral part of the legal framework across the globe?

Those are bigger questions than this column can answer but I would like to highlight a couple of recent conversations that point in useful directions.

Stewardship

The first concerns stewardship and a change in mindset that needs Impact lawyers help.

Careful management of investments for clients and beneficiaries is a core function of asset owners and managers. Responsible investors have been a major driver behind incorporating ESG and sustainability into the analysis of the long-term financial well-being of clients and beneficiaries.

Dr Donna Loveridge of the University of Melbourne has recently released a thoughtful paper on systems-informed stewardship that argues that “[as] it is most often understood and practised, stewardship is not yet realising its potential”.

The paper notes first of all the enormous potential of effective stewardship in the financial sector – which comprises around a quarter of the global economy – to address climate change, nature loss and widening social inequality. 

But that potential is not being met. “Activities are prioritised over outcomes, and few organisations have strategies that clearly link their work to meaningful, real-world change. As a result, stewardship often centres on compliance-oriented reporting and routine engagement, without addressing the deeper, less visible factors that shape outcomes.”

Dr Loveridge suggests a more holistic view of stewardship is needed.   The analysis needs to look beyond asset owners and managers to include consultants, advisors, service providers, regulators, and other actors. Stewardship needs to be reframed as a complex, dynamic system rather than a collection of isolated investor activities.  

This is an Impact law challenge. The view that ESG is too process-driven is widely shared. Impact law and lawyers have a role to play in addressing that problem. Dr Loveridge’s paper reflects on and refreshes the purpose of stewardship. But what tools can an Impact lawyer build to advance a systems-informed stewardship?  

Let me highlight one toolkit that starts the conversation with clients – the STEP Responsible Stewardship Toolkit – which was put together by GAIL member Gina Pereira and her colleagues. It is through infrastructure like toolkits that Impact lawyers give practical meaning to these issues.

Green Bonds and Resilience

Building the legal infrastructure for Impact outcomes requires patience.  It can take time but the impact is correspondingly deeper.

The green bonds market is a good example.  At a recent seminar in Australia, Sean Kidney from the Climate Bonds Initiative (CBI) reported that over the last 15 years the green bond market has grown worldwide from USD2 billion to USD6 trillion. It is now an established market that directs finance towards green, social and sustainability applications without preferential pricing. 

That did not happen by accident. It is the result of persistent work by many people, including lawyers. It is an encouraging example of how finance can be redirected towards positive outcomes and also a reminder that doing so requires many different drivers and contributions.

CBI noted in their Global State of the Market 2024 report that there is massive potential for sovereign issuers to convert their expenditures to qualify for green bond – and social and sustainability bond – funding, and that the current process of updating Paris Agreement Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) may help to do so.

This will in turn drive initiatives – many different initiatives at many different levels – that will focus Impact lawyers on two enormous challenges: 

• how to build resilience – how to create solutions to the disruption, damage, conflicts and injustices that climate change will bring, before they arise, and
• how to support that economically – how to evolve into an Impact economy that creates systemic value for and through independent actors.

Looking ahead to those challenges and opportunities is both sobering and energising. Turning them into practical action is the task for GAIL members. The Mexico Summit will be an opportunity to connect with other lawyers around the world who are focused on doing exactly that. 

I look forward to seeing you there.

Michael Ryland
24 September 2025