Imagining sustainable finance as a culture, not a product.
Executive Summary
▾- This insight emerged from a project commissioned by the European Union, where, through several workshops, we 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), 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
- A foresight artifact: a conceptual prototype illustrating what a youth-centered sustainable banking experience could look like if redesigned from scratch (not a product, but a strategic tool to make invisible assumptions visible)
- What is foresight? It is not about predicting the future but creating transformative spaces where you can analyze what's really blocking change, imagine alternative futures, and develop strategy that's deeper, more inclusive, and longer-term.
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 illiteracy
Most people struggle with basic financial concepts — creating significant barriers to informed decision-making about investment. Even fewer 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 optimization 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.
As long as financial security determines quality of life and social position, individuals 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: alternative future scenarios.
A. Preferred future
The problem was the information gap regarding sustainable finance. Everybody becomes educated on the topic and consequently adopts sustainable finance practices. We no longer differentiate traditional finance from sustainable finance — sustainable finance is the new finance. Communication around it is clearer, complexity barriers have been reduced, and sustainable finance 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 — people continue choosing traditional finance over sustainable alternatives despite understanding the implications. This means the problem lies in deeper structural incentives and cultural myths about money and individual responsibility. Sustainable finance is recognized as "harm reduction" within a flawed system rather than a comprehensive solution.
"The question is not whether people understand sustainable finance — it's whether the system is designed to make choosing it feel natural."
III. A day in the life: sustainable finance as a culture.
"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.
Banking mockup — a foresight artifact, not a product.
At work, conversations about money feel familiar but different. Colleagues and I still share investment tips over lunch — 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. There is a platform where I can immediately access the business model and pitch deck, connect with other potential investors, and understand exactly how my contribution would be used.
The app shows 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. Finance is no longer a distant machine — it is part of my everyday life.
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.
