Reframing Welfare: Expectations, Collaboration and Ownership at the World's Largest Sovereign Wealth-Fund

Abstract

This article explores the historical emergence and current crafting of the expectation documents that Norges Bank Investment Management use to exercise ownership of the corporations in which the world’s largest sovereign wealth-fund invests. It shows how these expectations are grounded in characteristics that render sustainability an immanent issue to this fund, and how the documents emerge from collaborative relations that arise from a ‘productive incompleteness’, which enables a distinctive distributive form of agency. Sketching how the expectations enable corporations to address life and well-being around the globe, it argues that the documents reframe welfare in terms that complement yet exceed the politics and bureaucracy of the nation-state. Investigating how these processes occur through a globalising communicative field, it expands anthropological studies of finance beyond derivatives and markets to include ownership as a function of dialogue.