The Handbook of System-Level Investing: How Experts Worth Trillions of Dollars Are Rethinking Investing

Jon Lukomnik

Miniver Press, Mar 3, 2026 - Business & Economics - 354 pages

Investing always evolves. The investing challenges of the 21stcentury are new, destabilizing and systemic. They involve complex, interconnected global issues that impact societies and economies. To maximize returns while minimizing risk, investors need to consider the interplay and interdependencies between their investments, the real economy, and the complex challenges of our environmental, social, and financial systems. System-level investing does just that.
Building on and going beyond traditional finance theory and sustainable investing practices, system-level investing recognizes the need for capital markets to be able to efficiently create investment opportunities from a flourishing real economy, which in turn, depends on robust social, financial, and environmental systems.

At the same time, investing influences those systems. The feedback loops are complex. System-level investors intentionally seek to manage their impacts on global systems, recognizing that mitigating systemic risks can reduce investment risk and enhance returns. Doing so, however, requires new investment strategies that directly address challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, racial and gender injustice, income inequality, and food and health systems fragility, among others.

"The Handbook on System-Level Investing offers a timely and comprehensive synthesis, bringing together leading practitioner and academic perspectives to demonstrate how systemic risks can shape long-term market outcomes. It serves as a useful reference for those interested in how system-level investing is applied in practice." - Genevieve Hayman, PhD, Senior Researcher at CFA Institute

"The Handbook on System-Level Investing is vital reading for anyone at any stage of their system-level investing journey. It provides both timely inspiration and practical advice, drawing on real-life examples and insights from some of the world's leading authorities in this space." - Caroline Escott, Head of Investment Stewardship and Co-Head of Sustainable Ownership, Railpen

"As a former foundation CEO responsible for stewarding a large, mission-driven endowment, I have seen firsthand how difficult it is to translate concern about systemic risks - from climate instability to inequality - into coherent investment strategy. Many institutions acknowledge that these forces shape long-term portfolio outcomes. Far fewer have a practical framework for responding to them.

The Handbook on System-Level Investing provides that framework. Bill Burckart and Jon Lukomnik move the conversation beyond point solutions to address a more fundamental question: how can large asset owners influence the systems that determine long-term economic resilience and societal well-being?

This book is rigorous, pragmatic, and deeply attuned to fiduciary reality. It offers trustees, investment committees, and asset managers a clear architecture for aligning capital with systemic stability and long-term value creation. For anyone serious about building an impact economy, this handbook is essential reading. - Kieron Boyle, CEO, 100x Impact; former CEO, Guy's & St Thomas' Foundation

About the author

Forbes calls long-time institutional investor Jon Lukomnik one of the pioneers of modern corporate governance. The managing partner of Sinclair Capital LLC, a strategic consultancy to institutional investors, Jon has been the investment advisor or a trustee for more than $100 billion (including New York City's pension funds) and has consulted to institutional investors with aggregate assets of more than $2 trillion dollars. He currently serves as Brandmeyer Fellow for Sustainable Investing and adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Jon also is a trustee for the Van Eck mutual funds where he chairs the governance committee, and Senior Fellow at the High Meadows Institute. He serves on the Board of The Shareholder Commons and the Externality Investment Research Network, and on the Advisory Board of The Investment Integration Project. He previously served as a member of the Deloitte Audit Quality Advisory Committee and the Standards and Emerging Issues Advisory Group of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. Internationally, he has been affiliated in various ways with Euronext, the World Bank/International Finance Corporation Investor Task Force, CPA Canada, Jon co-founded the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN) and GovernanceMetrics International (now part of MSCI). He served for more than a decade as the executive director of the IRRC Institute and is a former Pembroke Visiting Professor of International Finance at the Judge Business School at Cambridge and has taught sustainable finance for Vienna University's program at Harvard. Jon's previous book, "Moving Beyond Modern Portfolio Theory: Investing That Matters", co-authored with Professor Jim Hawleyrk focuses on MPT's inability to deal with systematic risk and provides a coherent finance theory for systems-level investing. It is widely praised as the "seminal" work on system-level investing. He also has co-authored three other academic books about capital markets and corporate governance, several chapter in various textbooks, and more than 200 academic and practitioner papers. William Burckart is the CEO and co-founder of The Investment Integration Project (TIIP), a consulting and analytics firm that enables institutional investors to understand and manage their influence on the long-term health of environmental, social, and financial systems. He also serves as an Adjunct Professor and the Brandmeyer Fellow for Impact and Sustainable Investing at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where he teaches on the evolution of sustainable finance and the practice of system-level investing. A recognized leader in the field, William has spent over two decades advancing the idea that investors must look beyond individual securities and consider how their decisions both shape and are shaped by broader systemic conditions. He is a Fellow of the High Meadows Institute, associate editor of the Handbook on System-level Investing (Miniver Press, 2026), and co-author of 21st Century Investing: Redirecting Financial Strategies to Drive Systems Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2021), the first book to define and articulate the principles of system-level investing. He also co-edited New Frontiers of Philanthropy (Oxford University Press, 2014), a landmark volume on the emerging tools reshaping global philanthropy and social investment. In addition to his work at TIIP, William co-founded Colorful Capital, a venture capital firm that brought capital support to enterprises founded and led by members of the LGBTQ+ community, helping expand access to financing for historically underrepresented entrepreneurs. He also co-authored a regular column for Nasdaq examining how investment practices intersect with LGBTQ+ progress and broader questions of equity and economic inclusion. He previously served as a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, where his work contributed to early efforts to connect finance, community development, and systemic economic outcomes. William's writing and commentary have appeared in Barron's, The Guardian, Pensions & Investments, Chief Investment Officer, Forbes, Quartz, top1000funds, Investment & Pensions Europe, Benefits & Pensions, InvestmentNews, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ImpactAlpha, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and FundFire, among other outlets.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Handbook of System-Level Investing: How Experts Worth Trillions of Dollars Are Rethinking Investing
• Author: Jon Lukomnik
• Editors: Jon Lukomnik, William Burckart
• Publisher: Miniver Press, 2026
• ISBN: 1939282594, 9781939282590
• Length: 354 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Economics / General; Business & Economics / General