From the introduction:

Firms or other actors such as NGOs act as facilitators of relations and cooperation. Through the relational economic lens, they become multi-stakeholder agents societally entrusted with proportioning the available and invested resources to productively create value. They are a “nexus of stakeholders and resources”.

This chapter aims at analysing the role of NGOs as a nexus of stakeholders and how they enter into relations and communicate with financial institutions. The case study entailed interviewing three European project managers of the international civil society network “Fair Finance Guide” [FFG].

The FFG has made it its goal to strengthen the commitment of financial institutions to social, environmental and human rights standards by providing evidence-based research and analysis. The network utilises its own, specially developed methodology to assess and report investment policies and practices where banks achieve points for certain predetermined topics. The findings are published in the form of a ranking to enable consumers and policyholders to demand more socially responsible, sustainable and fair investments as well as to improve democratic oversight. Currently the network is active in thirteen countries across the world. (...)

Ultimately the goal is to work out how these NGOs succeed in improving the economic value creation and conduct of banks. A guiding interest was to analyse how the theory of Relational Economics might be able to explain the formation of relations and to test the theory in practice. The aspiration of this research is therefore to provide a building block to the conceptualisation of a complete theory of Relational Economics and, by focusing on NGOs, to enrich the discussion by supplementing a look “from the other side” on the conduct of firms.