Columbia University— Sustainable Investing Research Initiative (SIRI)

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About the partnership

Mirova Research Center has established a multi-year collaboration with Columbia University’s Sustainable Investing Research Initiative (SIRI) with the aim of advancing blended finance as a lever for sustainable development. This partnership brings together one of the world’s leading academic institutions and a pioneer in responsible investment to create a shared knowledge platform.
The initiative is led by Professor Caroline Flammer, SIPA Vice Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs, Director of SIRI, and Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics at Columbia University, with joint appointments at SIPA and the Columbia Climate School.

Objectives

MRC–Columbia SIRI partnership pursues three interconnected objectives:
  • Advancing rigorous academic research.
    • The partnership supports multi-disciplinary research on blended finance, examining questions such as how to identify and scale investable projects, how to structure effective public-private partnerships, how to allocate risk appropriately across investor types, and how to evaluate the real-world impact of blended finance transactions. By generating evidence-based insights, this research aims to inform the practices of investors, fund managers, and policymakers, while contributing to the broader academic knowledge base on sustainable finance.
  • Fostering dialogue across sectors.
    • Scaling blended finance requires collaboration between stakeholders who do not always share the same language or incentives: private investors, public institutions, development finance organizations, philanthropic foundations, and policymakers. The partnership provides a structured platform for convening these actors, facilitating the exchange of experience and the identification of shared solutions to common barriers.
  • Educating the next generation.
    • A durable expansion of the blended finance market depends on the capacity of its practitioners. The partnership contributes to the training of current and future investors, project managers, policymakers, and world leaders — equipping them with the analytical tools and practical understanding needed to design, deploy, and evaluate blended finance strategies. SIRI’s fellowship programs and research development workshops play a central role in this effort, with a particular focus on supporting junior scholars and researchers from the Global South. Building on this commitment, SIRI has also developed dedicated educational offerings on blended finance at both the graduate and executive levels — including master’s-level courses and executive education programs — ensuring that these insights reach not only the next generation of academics, but the decision-makers and investors shaping the field today.

Why Columbia SIRI?

Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) brings together deep, cross-disciplinary expertise spanning economics, finance, social sciences, environmental science, and engineering. Its PhD program in Sustainable Development is one of the few in the world to combine rigorous social science with natural science and engineering, offering a uniquely integrated perspective on the challenges at the intersection of global development and environmental sustainability. SIRI is ideally positioned to serve as an international hub for scholarship, dialogue, and education on blended finance — and through this partnership, MRC contributes directly to that mission

To develop the blended finance market, it is essential to better understand current practices. This includes understanding the challenges and opportunities that arise to identify and develop projects that can be invested, the characteristics of effective public-private partnerships, balancing and allocating risks among investors, improving financing structures, and accelerating the growth of blended financial market, among other aspects.

Caroline Flamer

Director of SIRI

As part of the partnership between SIRI and MRC, we will be supporting academic research that is practice relevant, sharing the data and results derived from it, and promoting them to all our stakeholders to contribute to the rapid advancement of the implementation of new best practices in blended and support its growth.

Manuel Coeslier

Head of Mirova Research Center

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