Imagining sustainable finance as a culture, not a product.
Executive summary :
- This insight emerged as part of my work as a founding member of the Youth Community of Practice (Youth CoP) – funded by the European Union, where I explored a recurring question at the intersection of finance, sustainability and youth engagement :
Is access to sustainable finance primarily an education problem ? Or does resistance originate at a deeper, systemic level?
Using Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) — a strategic foresight methodology — I examined sustainable finance beyond surface-level awareness gaps, looking instead at the cultural narratives, structural incentives and assumptions about money that shape financial behavior. The work combined :
- Analysis of financial literacy and sustainable finance adoption;
- Dialogue with youth and social entrepreneurs;
- The design of a concrete foresight artifact: a prototype banking experience illustrating what sustainable finance could look like if it were aligned with everyday culture, governance and trust.
What follows is not a policy recommendation, but a systems-level diagnosis of why sustainable finance struggles to scale, and what kind of futures it might realistically enable.
I - What is the current state of things ?
A – WIDESPREAD FINANCIAL LITERACY
- Most people struggle with basic financial concepts. This creates barriers to informed decision-making about investment making.
- Even fewer people understand sustainable finance specifically: OECD data reveals that only 20% of adults across participating countries are aware of sustainable financial products, with significant variation.
- When finance is combined with sustainability, alienation is often amplified rather than reduced :
- Many people already disengage from finance because it feels complex and opaque. Sustainability, meanwhile, is increasingly met with skepticism due to greenwashing and political backlash. When these two worlds merge, the result can be cognitive overload — and disengagement.
- This information asymmetry prevents effective matching between sustainable finance supply and the very demand it is meant to serve.
- This dynamic creates missed connections, even among natural allies. Social entrepreneurs, for example, are often ideal candidates for impact investing or sustainable finance products. Yet many still turn to traditional venture capital simply because they are unaware that impact investors exist.
B – TENSION BETWEEN CAPITALISM AND SUSTAINABILITY
- The current system frames financial success through maximization metrics (growth, returns, beating markets…) while sustainability requires optimizations for different values (long-term stability, collective benefit, planetary boundaries).
= Finance remains inaccessible to most people while sustainability is widely viewed as marketing rhetoric, particularly following greenwashing scandals. When combined, sustainable finance appears as elite virtue signaling – the intersection of two already-distrusted concepts that ordinary people cannot access, understand, or trust.
- Money equals « winning » in cultural narratives : as long as financial security determines quality of life and social position, individuals (regardless of wealth level), will remain trapped in maximization behaviors. The myth of endless growth and individual accumulation overrides collective long-term thinking, even among those with sufficient resources to absorb short-term losses for sustainable gains.
II - Imagining sustainable finance : alternatives future scenarios
A – PREFERRED FUTURE
- The problem was the information gap regarding sustainable finance.
- Everybody becomes educated on the topic and consequently, adopt sustainable finance practices. We no longer differentiate traditional finance vs. sustainable finance.
- Sustainable finance is the new finance. The communication around sustainable finance is clearer. Everybody understands it. Complexity barriers have been reduced. Sustainable becomes an effective tool for a just transition future.
B – NON-PREFERRED FUTURE
- Education fails. Despite education on the topic, there is no shift in behavior i.e. people continue choosing traditional finance over traditional finance despite understanding sustainability implications.
- Means the problem lies in deeper structural incentives and cultural myths about money and individual responsibility. Sustainable finance is recognize as « harm reduction » within flawed systems rather than a comprehensive solution.
III - A day in the life : sustainable finance as a culture (preferred
future).
« Bank account statements are no longer about how much you have but how your money is helping the planet — and how you help shape that impact. »
- I wake up and check my banking app. My balance is there, of course, but the headline shows my impact: 72% of my savings are currently fueling projects that regenerate communities and ecosystems.
- If I want details, I tap — everything is integrated into the app, so I don’t need a dozen accounts. I see the solar cooperative powering schools in my city, the affordable housing initiative in my neighborhood, and reforestation programs I’ve chosen to back in Central Africa and South America.
- Through my app, I can see photos, progress updates and even stories from the field. But it is more than transparency : I have a voice that is being listened to. The solar cooperative is sending quarterly proposals, and as an investor, I vote on whether to expand to more schools or focus on battery storage. I can ask questions, understand risks, and participate in shaping these missions — all in one place. Finance is no longer feels a distant machine : it is part of my everyday life and I understand everything about it.
- At work, conversations about money feel familiar but different. My colleagues and I still share investment tips over lunch for sure. But now we’re comparing which reforestation projects have the best returns, debating whether the local housing cooperative is overvalued, or recommending a promising clean tech startup. Sustainable finance is just finance now.
- After work, I stop by a community workshop where once a month, local entrepreneurs present micro-investment opportunities. One project catches my attention: clean water filtration. There is a platform where I can immediately access the business model & pitch deck and connect with other potential investors and understand exactly how my contribution would be used. I even have the opportunity to talk with the entrepreneur during the workshop.
- Later, I check the notifications from my app :
- An update from the reforestation cooperative in Brazil I support. They’ve completed their first harvest under new soil-restoration methods, and they’re asking backers to weigh in on a strategic pivot based on new climate data. I join the discussion with other investors from around the world, adding my perspective to the collective decision-making.
- The app show my returns, but it also contextualizes them: this month, my investments helped avoid 18 tons of CO₂, provided housing for 6 families, and supported livelihoods for 42 farmers across three continents. More importantly, I see the decisions I participated in: 3 governance votes cast, 2 community discussions joined, 1 local project visit planned.
€12,847
Your money is regenerating communities
72%
of your savings in regenerative projects
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Brazil Reforestation Co-op
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Soil restoration methods completed first harvest. Farmers asking investors to weigh in on climate adaptation strategy.
Banking mockup.
IV - CONCLUSION ?
- Rather than assuming education will solve the sustainable finance adoption problem, this CLA framework treats education as a diagnostic tool to identify where resistance actually originates. While sustainable finance represents important progress within existing economic constraints, its ultimate effectiveness may depend on addressing deeper questions about how we organize economic systems around growth, competition, and individual accumulation.
- Whether sustainable finance proves to be a stepping stone toward systemic change or a « placebo » that maintains unsustainable systems while providing psychological comfort remains to be determined through the kind of systematic education experiment outlined above.
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