Stream 6

Chair: Robert Gutsche (Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland)

Description:
Maximizing shareholder value and focusing on short-term results comes at the expense of social and environmental interests, and trusting markets to generate long-term value has unacceptable outcomes (Fatemi & Fooladi, 2013). Under those circumstances, scholars' and practitioners' interest in alternative finance and ESG accounting is growing (Tsang, Frost, & Cao, 2023). Since the microcredit institution Grameen Bank in Bangladesh was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2006, the idea of finance as a lever for positive social change has gained increasing traction and credibility. The term ‘sustainable finance’ (or related terms such as ‘social finance’, Lehner, 2016) encompasses a variety of financing and investment instruments and mechanisms that are generally located outside the traditional financial system and the global circuit of capital accumulation and represent an alternative to it due to their primacy of social value creation. Examples include blockchain applications, sustainable cryptocurrencies, NFTs (Chandra, 2022), community shares (Mabhena & Moyo, 2014), social impact bonds (Sinclair et al., 2017), crowdfunding (Farhoud et al., 2021), impact investing (Agraval & Hockerts, 2021), to name but a few.

A holistic understanding of sustainable finance and ESG accounting requires considering societal and political factors and the interplay between power structures and social values (Lehner & Harrer, 2019). The phenomenon's complexity calls for inter- and multi-disciplinary perspectives, and we encourage scholars from various fields to contribute to the streams’ discussion.