Various kinds of sustainable finance have grown rapidly after the 2015 Paris Agreement. But whether this allegedly “sustainable” way of investing can actually fulfill the crucial task of facilitating the mitigation of climate change depends very much on the concrete business schemes and investment practices that are adopted. This chapter conceptualizes ESG (environmental, social, and governance) as the infrastructure that underpins “sustainable” investing. It argues that ESG constitutes a particular set of market devices – data, ratings, and indices – that define the logic, structure, and outcomes of sustainable investing. Having historically emerged as market-driven private standards for governing how to invest “sustainably,” ESG investing was, as this chapter demonstrates, guided by the ways in which a small set of private actors defines its infrastructural arrangements. Consequently, a preference for a market-friendly and one-sided conception of sustainability exclusively focused on risks to investors’ portfolios (“single materiality”) was implemented by the actors that defined de facto standards. This setup of ESG creates what can be called an “infrastructural lock-in,” whereby this particular conception of “sustainable” investing – which is not utilizing all available transmission mechanisms to actively advance sustainability – becomes the baseline and the common standard for “sustainable” finance.

Green financial infrastructures are spaces for professionals to exert claims to issue control. What professionals want, above all else, is to determine the content of green finance to reflect their varying interests. While they may seek environmental progress or financial profits – or some combination thereof – they are primarily interested in determining how green finance works and who is permitted to work on it. This chapter reviews how issue control in green financial infrastructures generally develops. It discusses professional contestation over who is permitted to work on an issue, the formation of boundary objects that include/exclude, the forging of governance objects, and attempts at technical automaticity. The concern is with professional jurisdictional battles, trials of strength over issue content, and the establishment of technical infrastructures.