From ESG principles to financial system coordination: A bibliometric analysis of sustainable finance research

Abstract

Type of the article: Research ArticleAbstractSustainable finance has evolved from a set of environmental, social and governance principles and specialized instruments into a field concerned with the transformation of financial institutions, markets and public policy. This study examines the conceptual structure, temporal evolution, and cross-thematic integration of sustainable finance research, while identifying the institutional mechanisms and unresolved coordination gaps. A combined bibliometric and qualitative content analysis was conducted on 11,629 Scopus-indexed articles and reviews published between 2000 and 2025. Keyword co-occurrence mapping generated a network comprising 383 terms across four clusters, while qualitative analysis covered 30 influential and recent publications. Publication activity was highly concentrated in 2020–2025, which accounted for 84.4% of the corpus. Cross-cluster relationships represented 59.5% of the network’s total weighted link strength, indicating thematic interconnectedness. The strongest integration linked green finance and the energy transition with regulation, technology, and the green economy. The qualitative synthesis identified six research streams, with banks emerging as the most prominently represented transmission channel, while coordination among monetary, prudential, fiscal, environmental, industrial and capital-market policies remained fragmented. These streams provide the basis for a preliminary five-function conceptual framework for financial system coordination encompassing information production and verification, governance, financial intermediation and investment, public-policy design and rule-setting, and digital and analytical infrastructure. The study distinguishes thematic integration within the literature from actual institutional coordination, thereby providing regulators and financial institutions with an analytical basis for designing sustainable finance policy mixes rather than relying on isolated instruments.AcknowledgmentsThe authors acknowledge with gratitude the financial support provided by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine for the research project “Financial and institutional framework for the sustainable recovery of Ukraine’s economy: an ESG-oriented model of interaction between the state, financial, and real sectors”, state registration number 0126U000594.