Marc Andrew Brightman (University di Bologna)

'Impact, investing, and the “tyranny of metrics”: exploring sustainable finance’s dependence on measurement’
Abstract: Advocates of sustainable finance make moral claims to be able to harness financial technologies in order to improve social and environmental outcomes more efficiently than the public sector, international organisations, or NGOs. Financial actors seeking to establish these claims face two major and related challenges: one of classification of assets (which securities are to be considered green and sustainable?), and one of accountability (how are social and environmental outcomes of an investment demonstrated?). Impact ‘thought leaders’ like Ronald Cohen call for better metrics as the key to aligning markets with sustainability objectives. Ethnographic methods help to explore how labeling of financial products as sustainable increasingly relies on claims to achieve measurable outcomes. As authors like Jerry Muller and Sally Engle Merry have shown, the deployment of metrics as tools of governance and control can distort outcomes. In this article we consider how measurement is used in cases that pursue green, development, and other impact goals through bonds and bond-like structures.