Rendering transparent and opaque: the materiality of green, social and sustainability bonds

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are increasingly seen as financially material or relevant to investments. In this paper, I explore how the SDGs come to be, or shape what becomes, financially material, using the case of the New South Wales Sustainability Bond Programme – a first-of-its-kind by an Australian state to (re)finance projects that contribute to the SDGs. Bringing work on materiality in the social studies of science and finance in conversation with scholarship on audit culture, I trace the documentation that forms the materiality of the bond programme. I show that the SDGs are usefully enrolled as a material frame to make the quality of green, social and sustainability (GSS) bonds visible. The SDGs, in other words, signify a form of sustainability shared by market participants, one that has bearing on market practices. Paradoxically though, this form of sustainability obscures, and therefore renders opaque, the complex spatial, temporal and material attributes of the projects financed by the programme.