Beyond greenwashing? The politics of meaning in sustainable finance

Sustainable finance is a prominent but contested feature of contemporary investment landscapes. Disclosure-based frameworks that require financial actors to publicly report how sustainability is reflected in their investment products amplify this dynamic. Two distinct analytical orientations structure scholarly debate on sustainable finance and its transformative potential. Structural perspectives explain why such regulatory approaches operate within rather than against financial logic, while actor-centered perspectives document heterogeneous constellations through which sustainable finance is constructed. Yet, neither theorizes the compliance process through which the macro-level regulatory architecture is translated into micro-level meaning-making, and, vice versa, how the conditions of the translation process shape what definitions of sustainability become institutionalized at macro-level. This commentary argues that a discursive-institutionalist lens illuminates the link between both accounts by focusing on the ideational and discursive dimensions of the compliance process and proposes a research agenda organized around three interrelated questions: under what institutional conditions the meaning of sustainable finance is collectively negotiated; how geopolitical and geoeconomic factors function as discursive occasions for revising those meanings; and finally, what governance through ambiguous disclosure-based regulations actually accomplishes.