Diane-Laure Arjaliès is an Assistant Professor at the Ivey Business School, Western University (London, Canada). She is a qualitative interdisciplinary scholar, working at the boundaries of accounting, sustainability and management. Trained as an accountant and an ethnographer, she has also acquired in-depth knowledge in the fields of sociology and finance. Her work uncovers the conditions and mechanisms through which non-financial values could be included in accounting and financial instruments, spurring ontological changes. Over the past years, she has studied the emergence of responsible investing, impact assessment, integrated reporting, and alternative currencies.
She is currently investigating the field of conservation finance, or the use of public-private funding mechanisms to finance green infrastructure. She is particularly exploring the modalities through which Canadian First Nations’ spiritual relationships to the land and the land itself could be included into a conservation impact bond. This bond involves channeling private money towards the protection of ecosystems in a way that accommodates Indigenous valuation systems, conservation science priorities and financial needs, without giving the primacy to one over the other. This research mobilizes a community-based participatory research method borrowed from the field of anthropology as well as the use of approaches developed in environmental studies. Throughout, she hopes to advance the field of conservation finance by exploring the mechanisms through which nature and incommensurable worldviews of nature could be included into the same financial device.
Diane-Laure Arjaliès is a Research Partner in the Greening Growth Partnership and The Economics & Environmental Policy Research Network.
