For most investors, social concerns live in a different file from the spreadsheet tracking returns. Meridiam decided two decades ago that those files should be the same document. The firm judges every potential investment not just by what it might earn, but by what it will do to the people around it—how workers get treated, who gets hired, what gets left behind. It’s a stance that sounds straightforward until you try to build a business on it, which is exactly what the Paris-based investment company has done.
Social concerns shape investment the same way they shape any business: questions about how workers are treated, whether privacy gets respected, who gets hired. The moral logic is plain enough. What matters more is the practical shift it demands—judging an investment not just by what it earns but by what it does to the world around it. Returns and consequences stop living on separate pages. They land on the same one.
Meridiam built a business on that premise. Over two decades, the independent asset manager and now certified B Corp has grown to oversee $3.8 billion across more than 40 projects worldwide—proof that making social impact a prerequisite rather than a footnote can work at scale.
Social responsibility as foundational code
When Meridiam launched two decades ago, the investment world ran on a simpler calculus: find the highest returns, take them, move on. Sustainability wasn’t part of the pitch. Even now, after COVID threw a harsh light on how infrastructure affects people’s lives, many firms treat social concerns as window dressing. A recent study by MainStreet Partners found that nearly a quarter of funds claiming to promote environmental or social goals remain at risk of greenwashing—making claims they can’t back up.
From its inception, Meridiam asked a different question. Infrastructure isn’t a short-term bet. It sits in place for decades, shaping how people live, work, and move. The world’s pressures—surging populations in poorer countries, swelling cities, aging societies in wealthier ones—aren’t going away. For an infrastructure investor, long-term profit depends on building things that last and matter to the communities around them. That requires a financing model that looks beyond immediate value extraction, one where social factors aren’t an add-on but a foundation, says Ginette Borduas, Partner and Head of ESG and Sustainability at Meridiam: “At Meridiam, ESG issues and resilience permeate all operational processes, ensuring that every investment aligns with the organisation’s sustainability objectives.”
The $4 billion overhaul of LaGuardia Airport’s Terminal B shows what that looks like in practice. While rebuilding runways and concourses, the firm hired hundreds of workers from Queens, the borough where the airport sits. It awarded more than $810 million in contracts to 270 businesses owned by women and minorities. It electrified ground operations to cut air pollution in a densely packed part of New York. The result is infrastructure that doesn’t just serve travelers passing through—it creates jobs, cleans the air, and shifts economic opportunity toward people who’ve historically been shut out—and proves that making money and making a difference aren’t necessary separate goals.
Building with the community
Good intentions at the start don’t count for much if they fade once construction begins. Delivering real social value over infrastructure’s long life—20, 30, sometimes 40 years—requires staying involved and paying close attention the whole way through. Meridiam doesn’t treat this as a side obligation. The firm sees itself as a steward of the infrastructure it builds, which means staying in the work rather than keeping a polite distance like most investors do.
The involvement starts early. Meridiam has built assessment tools that help teams spot social risks and opportunities before ground gets broken, shaping how a project will serve the people around it through development phases that can stretch for years. When the firm acts as project sponsor—building from scratch—it commissions social impact studies and weighs in on design choices meant to help local communities, limit harm, and set up safeguards for both construction and the decades of operations that follow.
NeuConnect, a 725-kilometer electricity line linking the UK and German power grids, shows what this sustained engagement looks like in practice. Here, Meridiam’s efforts went beyond standard stakeholder management. The firm set up a Community Fund that pays for work in the towns near both converter stations—refurbishing community centers in Germany’s Wilhelmshaven district, with similar projects underway in the Isle of Grain village in the UK. Instead of limiting contact to the public hearings required by law during permitting, Meridiam holds regular meetings with residents to share updates and fold their feedback into ongoing work when it can.
The fund also backs education programs with local high school students—one group in Germany finished a study on how the project affects bat populations—alongside efforts that support fisheries in the UK and scientific research in Germany. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t show up in quarterly earnings but shapes whether infrastructure becomes part of a community’s fabric or just another thing imposed on it. Meridiam’s bet is that the former pays off over time, in ways that matter beyond the balance sheet.
The red line for responsible investment
Apart from sustainable profits and positive publicity, Meridiam’s hands-on work yields another result: the firm can shape a project’s ethics from the start, putting money only behind work that won’t leave harm in its wake. Profit doesn’t settle the question alone. A project might promise strong returns, but if it degrades the environment or hurts people, it’s out. Oil and gas are off limits entirely, no matter the revenue. Other sectors—transport, for instance—get harder scrutiny. This influence allows Meridiam to set terms, steering partners toward higher standards when a project demands it: “When we identify a project with potential that doesn’t meet our sustainability standards and shows no sign of evolving in the right direction, we simply walk away,” Borduas explains.
Dakar’s bus system shows how this plays out. Senegal’s government wanted buses to ease the capital’s clogged streets. The original tender called for diesel. Meridiam saw room for something better and talked officials into switching to electric buses instead. The firm won the contract for the revised plan and now runs 121 electric buses along an 18.3-kilometer route from Guediawaye to southern Dakar. The gains reach beyond cleaner air, though that matters in a packed city. The project hired locally. Small shops opened along the route. Neighborhoods that had patchy transit now have buses they can count on. A 2024 audit found solid safety standards, good morale among workers, and real efforts to bring women into a sector that usually shuts them out. What could have been another diesel fleet turned into something closer to a working model—proof that the right infrastructure can do more than move bodies from one place to another. It can shift how a city works, and who benefits when it does.
With these and other examples, Meridiam has done the work of proving the model—shown that an infrastructure firm can reject oil and gas outright, can push a city toward electric buses instead of diesel, can steer hundreds of millions to businesses owned by women and minorities, and still grow to nearly $4 billion in assets. The blueprint is there, tested across continents and decades. And although the harder parts—the refusals, the deep involvement, the willingness to walk away from profit when the costs land on someone else—are still there, twenty years of results make a compelling case.
