Contact Information
Julie.bernard@uwaterloo.ca
Ev3-4229
Dr. Julie Bernard is an Assistant Professor of Sustainable Finance at the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development (SEED). She is also an Institute for Sustainable Finance Fellow. Her research sits at the intersection of sustainable finance, responsible investment, and the polycrisis encompassing climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. She primarily uses qualitative methods such as ethnography in her research.
Dr. Bernard's first stream of research examines shareholder activism, with a current focus on the anti-ESG movement. She has expertise in proxy voting and worked in this field prior to joining academia. This work explores the role of institutional investors in shaping corporate governance on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria, including climate-related commitments and disclosures. Specifically, she examines how shareholder proposals related to climate are supported through proxy voting and how these proposals are subsequently implemented at the corporate level. In 2025, she won ASAC's Past President Award for her research in this area.
Her second stream focuses on natural capital and nature-based solutions. From 2022 to 2024, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Ivey Business School, Western University — where she is still an Adjunct Professor — working on the replication and scaling of an innovative Canadian financial product that applies finance for nature-based carbon mitigation, the Conservation Impact Bond (CIB). She continues to be actively involved in the CIB project, currently supporting its third phase, which aims to scale the instrument to a Carolinian zone-wide initiative mobilizing multi-million dollars in capital. This work is directly relevant to Canada's commitments under the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework, which sets ambitious targets for the protection and restoration of nature, and for which nature-based solutions are recognized as an essential financing pathway.
Dr. Bernard earned her Ph.D. from Université Laval in 2022 and was a Bertram Scholar with the Canadian Foundation for Governance Research. Her research has received funding from several organizations, including Carbon Solutions @ Western and the Canadian Academic Accounting Association (CAAA).
Selected Publications
- Arjaliès, D.-L., Bernard, J., Whiteye, S., & Banerjee, B (Forthcoming). Braiding Indigenous and Western Sciences: A Two-Eyed Seeing Methodological Approach. Organization Studies special issue” The Future of Qualitative Research in Management and Organization Studies.”
- Arjaliès, D.-L., Bernard, J., & Patel, D. (2025). The potential of biodiversity offsets and credits to finance nature-based solutions. In Biodiversity Finance – The Financial, Operational, and Societal Impacts of Biodiversity Loss, series Palgrave Studies in Emerging Risk Management and Sustainable Finance. Palgrave Macmillan.
- Bernard, J. , Boiral, O., Guillaumie, L., & Brotherton, M.-C. (2023). Does proxy voting really promote corporate sustainability? Corporate Governance: An International Review, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12464
- Arjaliès, D-L, Bernard, J. & Putumbaka, B. (2021), Report on Responsible Investment & Indigenous Communities, funded by the Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership (Western University)
Degrees
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PhD - Administrative Sciences, Université Laval
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MAP - École nationale d’administration publique
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BScSoc - University of Ottawa