An Examination of the Relationship Between Environmental Performance and Socially Responsible Investing in the Oil and Gas Industry and a Case Study of BP

Master's Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject Business economics - Business Ethics, Corporate Ethics, grade: 80, London Metropolitan University (London School of Business and Finance), course: MBA, language: English, abstract: Although Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) represents only a small number of investors, nevertheless it is on the rise, which means that the environmental performance of oil and gas companies has certain implications for those companies' funding. The aim of this paper is to explore environmental performance in the oil and gas industry and the relationships between environmental performance and SRI in the company BP. A mixed research design is employed in this study in which two types of qualitative exploratory analysis are used: an illustrative case study with BP and semi-structured interviews conducted with 14 individuals including environmental managers, investor relations managers and investment managers. In addition, the researcher will use a qualitative comparison analysis in looking at publications produced by BP on the topic of environmental performance. In this dissertation, the researcher found there to be minimal correlation between environmental performance and its effects on investors' SRI decisions. This paper has implications for further enhancing the definition of environmental performance and increasing company value for SRI investors, although it is limited by the size of the sample and other uncontrollable variables. This paper increases the understanding of current definitions of environmental performance in the oil and gas industry and enhances values for SRI investors when investing in oil and gas companies. This research is the first to investigate the relationship between environmental performance and SRI using interviews as a research design method in exploring this topic in the oil and gas industry, as well the first research to establish best practice environmental performance management in the oil and