Aligning Social Investing with Nature's Timescales

his chapter focuses on the concept of time to evaluate the barriers and opportunities to environmentally responsible finance, and to assess existing governance reforms. With the sustainability discourse increasingly penetrating the financial economy, some investors and lenders profess to be more mindful of the value of long term and patient financial decisions, both for their own economic returns and environmental responsibility. However, the system of global finance capitalism, with its myopic and frenetic tempo, clashes with this aspiration. The movement for socially responsible investing, and the associated 'slow money' movement, are helping to inculcate more eco-friendly time-scales into the financial world. These movements are emerging agents of environmental governance, helping to overcome the lacunae and deficits in official regulation of the financial sector's environmental performance.