The Routledge Handbook of Green Finance

Green Finance is heralded in theory and practice as the new panacea - the ideal way to support the green transition of businesses into more sustainable, environmentally responsible forms, by means of incentivized financial investments. This handbook offers the most authoritative overview of Green Finance to date, presenting the state of the art, and including innovative directions from leading academics and practitioners. It focuses on Green Finance in a comprehensive way, discussing its characteristics, underlying principles and mechanisms. The book carefully illuminates the issues surrounding Green Finance and delineate its boundaries, mapping out and displaying the disparate voices, traditions and professional communities engaged in green and sustainable finance activities. Specifically, it examines the Environmental in the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) measurements, while also discussing the interplay between E, S and G. It develops a range of analytic approaches to the subject, both appreciative and critical, and synthesizes new theoretical constructs that make better sense of hybrid financial relationships. Furthermore, the handbook illustrates existing best practice and theory and examines the gaps to derive the necessary future research questions. It highlights the essential issues and debates and provides a robust research agenda. As such, it helps to create an effective market for the various green financing instruments through clarification and standardization. This handbook will be the standard reference work for a broad audience, encompassing scholars, researchers and students, but also interested professionals, regulators and policymakers, wishing to orient themselves in a rapidly developing and increasingly topical field.