EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Financialization of Civil Society Activism: Sustainable Finance, Non-Financial Disclosure and the Shrinking Space for Engagement

Cerrato Davide () and Ferrando Tomaso ()
Additional contact information
Ferrando Tomaso: Faculty of Law and Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp, Antwerpen 2000, Belgium

Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium, 2020, vol. 10, issue 2, 28

Abstract: Inspired by the principles of sustainable finance and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting, the European Union Directive 95/2014 on non-financial disclosure recognized that metrics and more transparency would foster internal debates, ensuring proper governance and helping to promote dialogue between management, the board and stakeholders, including civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Although significant academic attention has been paid to the -limited- space that the third sector had in the definition of the content of the Directive, not enough has been said on the way in which the Directive and ESG reporting can be leveraged by non-financial actors and what are the consequences of embracing accounting, non-financial reporting and corporate governance as tools for campaigning. This paper tries to fill the gap and asks some direct questions: are the Directive and the EU approach to sustainable finance opening spaces of engagement and confrontation that contribute to a true transition into a socially and environmentally sustainable future? Is the encounter between the financial realm and civil society a real win-win in the best interest of future generations and the planet? After presenting the background of the Directive and the three main opportunities that the ESG framework presents for civil society engagement, we conclude with a critical reflection on what is lost when civil society sits around the same table as financial institutions, uses their vocabulary and accepts that the conversation can only happen around those social and environmental causes that are financially material.

Keywords: sustainable finance; civil society (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/ael-2019-0006 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:aelcon:v:10:y:2020:i:2:p:28:n:7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ael/html

DOI: 10.1515/ael-2019-0006

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium is currently edited by Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Yuri Biondi and Shyam Sunder

More articles in Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:bpj:aelcon:v:10:y:2020:i:2:p:28:n:7