Bob Massie has been one of the most respected leaders in the field of sustainability and finance for nearly forty years. A student anti-apartheid activist at Princeton in the 1970s, Massie obtained a master’s degree in social and theological ethics from Yale Divinity School in 1982 and a doctorate in corporate strategy from Harvard Business School in 1989. His dissertation focused on how institutional investors integrated moral and political concerns into their investment policies. In 1993 he served as a Senior Fulbright Scholar on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at University of Cape Town. In 1998 he published Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years, which won the 1998 Lionel Gelber prize for the best book in the world on international relations.
In 1996 Massie became the first president of Ceres and helped to build it into the powerful coalition of investors, corporations, and sustainability organizations it is today. In 1998, believing that key capital market actors needed high quality, comparable sustainability data, he co-founded and chaired the Global Reporting Initiative. In 2002, he created and led the first Institutional Investor Summit on Climate Risk at United Nations headquarters in New York. That same year he was picked by CFO magazine as one of the 100 most influential leaders in finance. He also served for three years on the original International Integrated Reporting Commission (IIRC) chaired by Justice Mervyn King of South Africa.
His articles have appeared in publications such as the New York Times Sunday magazine, the Nation, Institutional Investor, and World Link, the magazine of the World Economic Forum. He has received numerous awards, including the Joan Bavaria Award and the Gold Medal of the Society for Progress at INSEAD.
Massie has also had a prominent role in the politics of his home state of Massachusetts, having served as the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in 1994 and as a candidate for governor in 2018. In recent years he has continued to work on mandatory sustainability reporting, the evolution of corporate governance, and the need for fundamental reform in the fields of accounting, finance, and economics. In the summer of 2023, he convened the Materiality Working Group, a monthly discussion group and clearinghouse of US and UK thought leaders who are focusing on charting the evolution of the intersection of sustainability and finance. In December 2024 he joined the Sustainable Investing Research Initiative (SIRI) within Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs as a Senior Research Scholar, Co-Chair of the Sustainable Finance Seminars, and director of the Pathways to Consensus program.