A moral turn in finance?

Abstract

With the use of financial technologies to address social and environmental problems, the global finance industry now has a new proclaimed moral aim. While impact and sustainable and climate finance are promising new frontiers for the management of social and environmental public concerns, a closer scrutiny reveals a more complex picture than the industry’s surface narratives. Here, new forms of finance extraction legitimize the reproduction of old power hierarchies. We explore the historical trajectory of financial moralities, situating these within the history of capitalism. This special section explores the articulation of a growing sustainability–finance nexus across intersecting institutional, political, and cultural contexts. The contributions included document ethnographically how emergent preoccupations about concrete environmental and social outcomes generate new kinds of financial products, transactions, and financial subjectivities.