Making development legible to capital: The promise and limits of ‘innovative’ debt financing for the Sustainable Development Goals in Indonesia

Abstract

Aligning private finance with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) promises to close the multi-trillion-dollar SDG ‘financing gap’ while unlocking trillions more in market opportunities. This article explores the processes mobilised for this alignment in Indonesia, an emerging country exemplified as a site where such opportunities are profuse. We do so through assessing modalities of planning, prototyping and building project pipelines designed to facilitate market development for green and SDG bonds. As these types of bonds are supposedly used only to finance socially and environmentally beneficial projects, they are placed at the forefront of innovations to align financial returns with sustainable development outcomes. To make sense of what these forms of innovative finance do, we weave scholarship on the financialisation of development and on (shifting) governance practices surrounding the development project, together with empirical material gathered from SDG finance events, document analysis and semi-structured interviews. We argue that the processes shaping market development for green and SDG bonds functionally iterate upon and extend an open-ended project of making development legible to capital: to see and act on the SDGs as an investable proposition. This legibility rests upon and engenders standard(ising) techniques to define what counts as ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ in ways that (in)visibilise impacts, promising – albeit speculatively – the realisation of social, environmental and financial goals. Here, the SDGs provide the institutional locus to enliven this promise, erasing the unevenness of finance-oriented development and legitimising capitalist modes of ‘seeing’ and ‘doing’ development around this promissory imaginary.