Making Finance Sustainable? A Comparative Perspective on the Politics of Investment

About the project

**Principal Investigator:** Natascha van der Zwan **Research Team:** Bastián González-Bustamante and Roelien van der Wel This project takes a comparative political economy approach to study the effects of governance on sustainable investment by large investors like insurance companies and pension funds. Sustainable investment involves the application of environmental criteria to financial investments. Despite increased policy interventions and political activism around sustainable investment, however, large investors have yet to realize the goal stated in the 2015 Paris Agreement: making “finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate resilient development” (Article 2.1 sub c). Bringing comparative political economy into conversation with economic and sociological studies of sustainable investment, the project seeks to understand how different types of political economies, each with their own institutional characteristics and modes of governance, produce distinct sustainable investment outcomes. Taking an actor-cantered institutionalist approach, we investigate governance at three distinct levels: the macro-organisation of the political economy, financial policy-making processes, and the micro-level governance of the investment process. We develop a retrieval-grounded, multi-agent workflow that converts retrieved reports from a sampling frame of the world’s 400 largest asset owners across 48 countries into structured and traceable evidence on seven conceptions of green and sustainable finance. Benchmarking informs role-specific LLM selection, while retrieved passages and retained primary-source evidence support inspection and validation. Responsible investment/ESG is the dominant conception, and reporting repertoires range from narrow ESG-centred narratives to broader transition-oriented combinations.