Overlap and fragmentation in the global governance complex of sustainable finance

Global governance initiatives addressing sustainable finance, whether for advancing climate risk disclosure or defining green bond standards, have proliferated for over 20 years. Emblematic of a larger trend of broadening global governance complexity, a key question is whether these proliferating initiatives – developed by public and private actors alike – are producing a division of labor or a duplication of efforts. Moreover, if duplication is occurring, are public initiatives more likely to contribute as compared to private or public-private initiatives? Building on the regime complexity literature, we assess these questions with an original dataset of 111 Sustainable Finance Governance Initiatives (SFGIs) established between 2000 and 2020. We expand on existing measures of institutional overlap and fragmentation by developing an approach that focuses on an initiative’s ‘governance space’, defined by an SFGI’s issue area, governance function, actor target, and time of launch. We find that while there is significant duplication in sustainable finance, the governance landscape is more characterized by a division of labor between issues, functions, and targets. Moreover, we do not find that public initiatives contribute more to duplication than other initiatives. As such, our article offers theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of global governance and the international political economy of finance.