Sustainable finance and the Sustainable Development Goals: a nudge-resistant zone?

Ellen Quigley, Ellen Quigley and Ellen Quigley

Chapter Chapter 22 in The Elgar Companion to Consumer Behaviour and the Sustainable Development Goals, 2025, pp 387-401 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a global consensus on the need to address global environmental and social issues that impede human progress and harm the natural world. This consensus is also reflected in public opinion polls and surveys of pension fund beneficiaries and retail investors; in countries all over the world, members of the public and individual investors are generally in favour of efforts to mitigate climate change, protect biodiversity, and decrease inequality. The behavioural science literature is replete with examples of how choice architecture and other behavioural interventions can contribute to these ends, with effects ranging from negligible to substantial depending on the domain and intervention design. This chapter argues, however, that the arena of long-term financial decision-making- especially regarding sustainable finance- may occupy a ‘nudge-resistant zone’ in which behavioural interventions other than defaults are unlikely to have an effect and in which defaults cannot be considered mere nudges. This is because financial products are both uncommonly difficult to understand and unusually ‘sticky’. Sustainable finance products, as we will see, are even more difficult to comprehend than standard equivalents- to the point of being counterintuitive, even for investment professionals. This has important implications for the ability of pension beneficiaries and retail investors to contribute to the SDGs through their investments.

Keywords: Sustainable Development Goals; Sustainable finance products; Long-term financial decision-making; Nudge-resistance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035325054
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