Stewardship is one of those words that has accumulated meanings faster than it has shed them. Once, it described a duty: the obligation to look after assets and interests held in trust for pension members, savers, the eventual recipients of the pound saved decades earlier. More recently it has come to describe a set of activities: meetings with management, resolutions filed, votes cast at AGMs, performed mainly one company at a time.

As Stephen Heintz has reminded us, stewardship of capital was never only about quarterly returns; it is, in his phrase, about "safeguarding the conditions that make prosperity possible". That older sense has been quietly reasserting itself, because the risks against which beneficiaries now need guarding sit further out than any single firm. Climate transition, biodiversity loss, inequality, the fragility of food and health systems: these are not properties of any company on a register. They are properties of the conditions in which every portfolio operates, and no amount of attentive stock selection escapes them.

Diversification, the central risk-management tool of the twentieth century, was built for risks that vary between companies. It cannot manage a risk that runs through all of them at once. A pension scheme cannot diversify its way out of a degraded climate, an unstable food system or a society that has lost the trust to function. Nor can the people whose savings sit inside it, because they have to live in those systems too, and so will their grandchildren.

This is the territory that Jon Lukomnik and William Burckart have been mapping for over a decade, and that The Handbook of System-Level Investing now hands to practitioners. It is an edited volume of investors writing about work they are doing rather than work they are admiring from a distance. The question it answers is the one that has stalled the field: how, concretely, does a fund operator, an asset manager, a policymaker or an asset owner act on a system-level concern within the constraints of a real mandate?

Minerva is sponsoring the UK launch because system-level investing hinges on a question we live with daily: whether the chain between beneficiary and outcome actually carries the interests it is supposed to serve. The Handbook does not duck that question.

There are two complementary events which we hope will supply some of the answers.

Wednesday 20 May 2026, 15:00–19:00 BST, Foresight offices, The Shard. A masterclass and UK book launch hosted by Charlotte O'Leary's team at Investors for Purpose. I will be there with Bruna Bauer and the authors, working through practical tools and case studies covering climate, biodiversity, inequality and the fragility of food and health systems, with examples of how managing each can both reduce portfolio risk and protect long-term value. Open to asset owners, advisers, institutions, policymakers and academics. Register via Investors for Purpose: https://zurl.co/3SyYm

Thursday 21 May 2026, 18:00–20:00 BST, Marshall Institute, LSE. A launch event hosted by the Marshall Institute, with opening remarks from Kieron Boyle (Marshall Institute; 100x Impact; UK Impact Investing Institute), an overview of the why, what and how from William Burckart, and a moderated discussion with practitioners actively applying these approaches. Every attendee receives a complimentary copy of the Handbook, followed by a reception. Seats are limited and approval-based: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/advancing-system-level-investing-through-the-impact-economy-tickets-1988012875025

Charlotte O'Leary, William Burckart, Jon Lukomnik and the Marshall Institute have done more than their share to move system-level thinking from theory into practice. We are delighted to be supporting the London launch.

Stewardship, fiduciary duty, the long-term integrity of the systems on which returns ultimately depend: most investment work touches at least one. If yours does, either of these events will repay the time.

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