Occupational pension funds are at the international center of sustainable investing, but rising geopolitical tensions raise the question if their focus on investing with environmental or social considerations will give way to a new era of security-focused investing. European pension funds have long professed a commitment to combining the realization of financial return with creating additional good – or at least, avoiding harm – for the greater benefit of society (McDonnell, 2024; Lundberg, 2025). They have been supported by an accommodating regulatory framework and sector-wide initiatives to further incentive sustainability (Van der Zwan and Van der Heide 2024). Recent years, however, have witnessed growing calls on pension funds to allocate more assets to defense and other forms of security, including suggestions to loosen regulatory restrictions on investing in controversial weaponry. That defense investing sparks controversy is evidenced by the ensuing political debate that questions whether security investments are in violation of sustainability principles, especially ethical ones, or if security is a necessary condition for more sustainable societies?

The main research question of this project is: How do regulation and policies shape pension funds’ commitments to security investments in different national contexts? We will interrogate the regulatory context to identify which formal rules and regulations regarding sustainability and security (national and, for Denmark and the Netherlands, European) are in place within each of the three cases. Our second variable of interest, policy, will be studied at two levels of analysis. At the sectoral level, we study both formal and informal policies that seek to mobilize pension funds’ support for security investments. Formal policies are written down and have been made public by governmental actors, bureaucratic actors or by the pension sector itself. The informal dimension includes policy signals from actors outside governmental or bureaucratic channels, for instance a Minister of Defense asking for pension fund defense investments in the media. At the fund-level, we study the investment policies set by individual pension funds.