As political backlash against ESG intensifies across North America and Europe, sustainable finance has become a site of open controversy. An SCI‑supported workshop explored how researchers can respond to this increasingly contested terrain. 

Authors: Jeremy Brice, Ben Eyre, Aarti Krishnan, Felicia Liu, Ian Robertson, Ser-Huang Poon, Narek Mirzoyan, Caroline Schuster, Catherine Mazhandu, Frances Brill, Qiuyu Jiang, Cancan Wang, Jens Christiansen, James Linsley-Parrish, Theo Stanley and Nicholas Jepson 

Relationships between politics, finance and sustainability are shifting rapidly as financial institutions’ engagements with environmental and social issues become the focus of controversy and contestation. Since the inauguration of the second Trump administration, politicians and government officials in the USA have denounced Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investment practices as contaminating financial markets with a radical or ideological ‘woke’ political agenda (Christiansen et al 2025). These accusations (and accompanying threats of divestment or regulatory action) have spurred many North American financial institutions to eliminate sustainable investment products and practices, and may also be driving a reduction in ambition among some multi-stakeholder sustainable finance networks (Makortoff 2025; Jessop and Kerber 2025). Some asset owners (principally European pension funds) have responded by withdrawing capital from North American financial institutions to ensure that it is invested and managed in ways compatible with their home governments’ regulatory requirements and their domestic clients’ political values (McDougall 2025; Raimonde 2025). By contrast, activists’ demands for Norway’s traditionally ‘non-political’ sovereign wealth fund to reinforce its human rights screening processes and divest from Israeli companies connected to the occupation of the Palestinian territories became a prominent focus of debate during the 2025 Norwegian general election campaign (Bangstad 2025).  

SCI members Jeremy Brice and Aarti Krishnan, working with SCI visiting researcher Ben Eyre, felt that the theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches that we had used in our previous research on the sustainable investment sector (for instance Brice et al 2022; Eyre et al 2024) struggled to accommodate and account for these developments. The ongoing backlash against sustainable investment especially calls into question a tendency in much existing research to present it as a broadly ‘antipolitical’ endeavour which authorises financial markets and actors to govern environmental and social problems through moving sustainability issues from the domain of political contestation into that of financial calculation (Parfitt 2024). In response to these challenges we organised a workshop at the Alliance Manchester Business School on ‘The Politics of Materiality in Sustainable Investment’ on the 16^th and 17^th of September  2025 , which was supported by SCI funding. This event drew upon a discussion-based workshop framework developed by SCI colleagues to identify blind spots in existing scholarship and surface possible new research opportunities (which is discussed in a previous post on this blog) and attracted participants from as far afield as Australia, Canada, Denmark and Switzerland. The workshop aimed to explore the challenges faced by critical scholarship on sustainable investment in the current political moment and to identify alternative theoretical and methodological orientations which might produce knowledge that responds more effectively to them.  

Current Research Challenges 

On day 1 of the workshop ,  participants discussed what difficulties or complications the current political moment raises for critical social science researchers working on sustainable finance. During these conversations we identified three distinct positional, methodological and theoretical challenges: 

1. Positional challenges: Increasingly overt political struggle over sustainable finance instruments and institutions undercuts familiar scholarly arguments that these arrangements serve to depoliticise sustainability and facilitate the surreptitious imposition of neoliberal governance agendas. However, it has also seen figures in the ‘anti-woke’ investing movement (and related political actors) justify their attacks on sustainable investment initiatives through claiming that sustainable finance actors are attempting to impose an ideological agenda on market actors through undemocratic means. This challenges critical scholars both to question whether their own analyses of sustainable investment’s antipolitical tendencies are being repurposed to advance authoritarian and anti-environmental political agendas and to ask whether the increasingly contested status of sustainable finance initiatives makes it necessary to move beyond these familiar critiques.  
2. Methodological Challenges: The explicitly political character of ongoing debates over sustainable finance also poses methodological challenges to scholarship exploring ‘technopolitical’ dimensions of financial practice. Such work typically examines struggles among sustainable finance actors over which datasets, standards and technical devices should be used to inform investment decisions and to evaluate their sustainability impacts. Often, it argues that these seemingly technical disputes advance specific visions of sustainability by granting their victors the authority required to impose definitions of sustainability which align with their interests and so to reconfigure the economic interests of others (Taeger et al 2025). However, many of the sustainable finance sector’s new political adversaries explicitly reject its conventions of epistemic credibility and instead problematise its influence and activities in cultural or ideological terms. Research methodologies orientated towards examining the production, circulation and performativity of knowledges produced within the sustainable finance field therefore arguably struggle to capture the stakes of some such political interventions or to account for their origins, internal logics and effects.  
3. Theoretical Challenges: This move beyond knowledge politics also unsettles much existing scholarship’s tendency to treat sustainable finance as part of a technocratic regime of neoliberal governance which presumes that market actors’ commercial expertise will equip them to find the most efficient solutions to social, economic and environmental problems. This settlement until recently offered financial actors considerable authority to define sustainability issues and to judge the desirability of policymakers’ attempts to address them – whether through developing purpose-built sustainable finance devices such as green bonds and debt for nature swaps or by adjusting the interest rates charged on government debt. However, increasingly explicit debate over the legitimacy of financial actors’ involvement in shaping sustainability policy and attacks upon the epistemic conventions which justify it suggest that this settlement is under pressure and may be breaking down. This challenges researchers to theorise whether (and if so how) the sustainable finance sector might operate in an increasingly multipolar and post-neoliberal world. 
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Directions for future research 

Discussions during the second day of the workshop explored how we as social researchers working on sustainable finance might broaden our theoretical and methodological repertoire in order to respond more effectively to these challenges, and thus to produce scholarship which better addresses the current political moment. Reflecting the varied disciplinary backgrounds, geographical contexts and empirical interests which inform our work, workshop participants did not aim to come to a single unified position. Instead, we identified several ways in which we could complement existing research approaches through attending to the following political sites, processes and phenomena: 

1. Discursive change: Social researchers might gain greater understanding of the processes which politicise specific sustainable finance initiatives and practices (and erode the legitimacy of some financial knowledges and devices) through attending to the redefinition and resignification of terms such as sustainability, gender and ESG. Exploring how opponents of sustainable finance attempt to endow such terminology with new and pejorative meanings might enable researchers to understand why some sustainable finance initiatives and practices become objects of political controversy while others attract little attention. It might also help to explain how the focus of such political disputes comes to be shifted away from contests over the technical content of financial data and devices and towards the terrain of cultural meanings and imaginaries.  
2. Coalition-building: Researchers might also examine how opponents of sustainable finance (for instance political parties and think tanks) attempt to utilise these new meanings to articulate political concerns which others might share, to make common cause with potential allies, and to mobilise them to pursue shared objectives. This might aid researchers in explaining how movements opposed to sustainable finance emerge, cultivate support, and exert political influence. Scholars might also examine how actors concerned with promoting and protecting sustainable finance practices (such as NGOs and investor networks) attempt to survive and resist the current ‘backlash’ against sustainable investment. Through examining what enables these disparate actors to coalesce into political movements, researchers might gain new means of understanding how political campaigns against sustainable investment initiatives are generated and of explaining why some sustainable investment coalitions endure in the face of political pressure while others diminish or retreat. 
3. Translation processes: Finally, it will be important to build upon existing research programmes examining how the meaning of sustainable investment is enacted and negotiated through the organisational cultures, practices and infrastructures of financial institutions. Existing research often focuses on financial professionals’ development of new sustainability knowledges, standards and devices and on their mobilisation to advance the interests or agendas of specific financial actors. However, it will be equally important for future scholarship to explore how financial institutions absorb the political pressures exerted by movements originating beyond the financial field. Such research might examine how financial practitioners perceive these political pressures, respond to them, and translate them into change in the way that they organise their work, think about and portray their roles, and position themselves in the political arena (or resist doing so). It might thereby illuminate how political contestation over sustainable finance produces organisational, institutional and economic change (or why it proves unable to do so). 

Next steps 

Since September workshop participants have continued working together to explore and expand upon these ideas in several ways. Many of us are now actively engaged in a collaborative writing project examining the challenges posed to sustainable finance research by the current political conjuncture and investigating possible responses to them, while other participants are developing a paper exploring how climate policy and reporting regimes shape the financial valuation of green technological innovation. Meanwhile several participants presented papers exploring the affective dimensions of sustainable finance contestations for a subsequent workshop on Emotions and Affect in Sustainability Transitions which was organised by SCI colleagues Pawan Srikanth and Aarti Krishnan in March 2026. We aim to consolidate this emerging network of scholarship through organising a panel on “The politics of sustainable investment: challenges, limitations, and ways forward for critical scholarship” at the SASE conference in Bordeaux in July 2026, which we hope will form the foundation of a lively and enduring research community. 

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