How do the capital markets undermine sustainable development? What can be done to correct this?

This article sets out how the capital markets relate to sustainable development issues and makes some modest proposals for how to improve our capital markets. It argues that capital markets' influence over corporate sustainable development originates via two principal routes: (i) financial influence—the buying and selling of equity shares and debt on the capital market influences the cost of capital for listed companies; and, (ii) investor advocacy influence—shareholders are the principals of the business and can exercise their rights of share ownership over their agents, the company directors, by sending explicit signals regarding the management of the company. Capital markets generally do not need to understand nor reward sustainable behaviour. This is either because the markets are inefficient and do not reward good behaviour, or because market failures means that investors do not need to worry about the very long term costs as they are outside of their investment time horizons. In order to change this, we should focus on the incentives of all key players within the capital supply chain such that they are all sanctioned and incentivized partly on their sustainability performance. The market also needs much better market information on the sustainability performance of companies. Better training of market participants on the materiality of sustainability issues as well as how they can be factored into valuation analysis would also help. However, before capital markets can be genuinely sustainable we need capital market policy makers to have greater regard for future generations when setting policy. This will require greater government intervention, particularly around the regulation of investor delivery of responsible ownership.