The constitutive role of law in sustainable finance

The sustainability transition requires a fundamental change in the way economies function to align socioeconomic systems with planetary boundaries. From a legal perspective, such a shift should entail a transformation of the prevailing legal coding of economic relations to enable consistent integration of social and environmental considerations. Within the emerging sustainable finance trend, shoots of change are visible: new financial instruments, such as green or sustainability-linked bonds and loans, appear to be reorienting the market relationships around sustainability impact issues. A sociolegal and legal institutionalist analysis of this trend reveals how such instruments shape and are shaped by different facilitative, regulatory and constitutive facets of law. Using EU green bond issuances as a case study, the article highlights how law expands and limits the transformative potential of such novel financial instruments. The analysis is revealing of the co-constitutive dynamics of law and sustainable finance. In this context, the article makes three contributions. Firstly, it offers a comparative case study of law’s co-constitutive dynamics in the case of financial innovation designed for environmental and social impact. Secondly, it identifies the co-constitutive dynamics of law and (sustainable) finance relating to differentiation and expansion.Thirdly, it finds variance in the law’s co-constitutive role at the micro-level of financial interactions, and in meso-structures that emerge in the context of sustainable finance specifically. To the extent that sustainable debt instruments are increasingly linked to a company’s overall performance and corporate governance, the article’s findings have implications for the integration of social concerns in financial instruments.