On 18 November 2019, the Investment Association (IA) launched an industry-wide framework aiming to categorise definitions relating to responsible investment. The IA’s responsible investment framework categorises, and provides standard definitions for, the different components of responsible investment.

The framework is embedded in a report that intends to provide context, guidance and uses for the framework. The framework itself can be found in section 4.2 of the report. A glossary appended to the report defines and explains the terms “Stewardship”, “ESG Integration”, “Exclusion”, “Sustainability Focus” and “Impact Investing”. The IA encourages investment managers to adopt the framework and definitions to provide clarity and consistency to investors on the approaches they take to responsible investment.

The IA states that from 2020 it will ask members to identify which funds should be classified as having responsible investment characteristics to help bring further clarity to the market. The IA will publish statistics on funds with responsible investment characteristics later in 2020.