Sustainable investing and financing for sustainable development: A hybrid review

Abstract

Sustainable investing and financing play a central role in achieving sustainable development goals. Using high-quality articles from the Scopus database, this study deploys bibliometric analysis followed by content analysis on 528 and 33 articles to synthesise the academic literature on sustainable investing and financing published between 2012 and mid-2022 and analyse the field's evolution and progress in research. The performance analysis identifies the field's most influential studies, and the conceptual and intellectual structures shed light on foundational themes and research progression. An in-depth content analysis identifies and reveals novel insights on three primary research themes: financing sustainability, asset returns, and sustainable outcomes. The key issues encompass investor motivations and investment performance of sustainable investments compared to conventional investments, challenges, and policy enablers that aid the development of sustainable financing and sustainability outcomes. The study also offers future research directions and concisely summarises research using the theories-context-characteristics-methods framework. The findings will help further theory development in academic research on sustainable investing and financing and have practical implications for investors, issuers, and regulators. Investors can gain insights into the performance of sustainable investments, issuers can understand the benefits of adopting sustainable finance, and regulators can obtain insights into the policy enablers that would result in more efficient outcomes. The limitation of the study is that it is qualitative and does not quantify factors or models that lead to sustainable development.