divestment

divestment, the disposal of assets in any of a variety of ways, usually for ethical, financial, or political reasons. At the institutional level, divestment is a policy and set of economic sanctions used by corporations, groups of shareholders, individuals, and governments to put pressure on a company or a country, usually to protest either the company’s or the country’s policies and practices. In this way, divestment serves as a means of leveraging economic power to help bring about political, economic, legal, or social change. This can occur in several ways, including the withdrawal of new corporate investment, withdrawal of available credit from banks, the selling off of operating units, the cutting off of operations, and the reduction of portfolio holdings in firms doing business in the target country. At the individual level, divestment occurs when stock holdings are released because of conflict of interest or when an individual investor sells stocks that appear to have a poor future.

Arguments supporting divestment that affects a company or country generally are based on either a positive assumption of rationality or a negative assumption that economic force is the only means for change. Both arguments assume a long time line and the necessity for cooperative effort by the divesting institutions. Reasons for divestment at the institutional level may be political, legal, financial, or ethical in nature. These often overlap one another. A company may respond to shareholder or consumer pressures and close down its operations in a country with a poor human rights record, doing so for financial and ethical reasons. Then another country’s government may ban investment, whether public or private, in that country. In this way, investment and divestment can be seen as either ethical or unethical, based on moral foundations.

Sanctions, selective purchasing, and disinvestment are additional actions that can be used along with divestment to bring about political, economic, and social reforms in a targeted country. Another strategy, constructive engagement, is the continuation of economic activity between a corporation or government and a targeted country. Often those who oppose divestment support constructive engagement as a viable alternative, maintaining that the ongoing economic relationship will bring about dialogue or pressure for change in the targeted country.

In the 1970s and 1980s, businesses and governments worldwide protested the apartheid regime of the white-ruled government in South Africa by divesting. Some examples of multinational corporations that partially or fully divested from South Africa during the 1980s include Eastman Kodak, International Business Machines (IBM), Coca-Cola, General Electric (GE), and Xerox. In 1987 the state of California divested by restructuring its investments so that $90 billion would be divested from companies doing business with South Africa. Divestment was used during the 1990s to protest the military-ruled government of Myanmar (Burma), when such multinational corporations as PepsiCo, Texaco, Hewlett-Packard, and Federated Department Stores (later Macy’s, Inc.). In both Myanmar and South Africa, the democratic opposition coalitions encouraged multinational corporations to return and reinvest only after a democratically elected government was established.

In 2006, because of continuing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, several states in the United States, including Illinois, Louisiana, Oregon, and New Jersey, passed legislation requiring public pension funds to divest companies operating in Sudan. In addition, several institutions of higher education, including the University of California, Harvard University, Amherst College, Yale University, and Stanford University, passed policies divesting their portfolios of investments in companies doing business with Sudan.

Some religious organizations have also viewed divestment as a moral obligation. In 2004 the General Assembly (governing body) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) approved selective divestment from corporations doing business with Israel out of objection to the country’s perceived violation of the human rights of Palestinians. In 2014 the General Assembly voted in favour of divesting from three major U.S. corporations that conducted business in Israel.