Digitalization will not automatically deliver SDG-aligned financing. Uncertainties, barriers and risks combine to make the future something to be shaped rather than predicted. Technological developments will clearly play an important role, notably in determining the cost, pace and quality of digital infrastructure, and in shaping the environmental footprint of digitalization. However, it is human agency and choice, and a balance of private capabilities and public interest that will ultimately determine the extent to which digitalization.
 “The international community should act in reshaping financial systems in line with sustainable development. If we fail to do so, we will fail to deliver the 2030 Agenda.” UN Inter-agency Task Force on Financing for Sustainable Development |
Commercial entrepreneurship will shape financial innovations and associated market dynamics and outcomes. Governments’ policies, fiscal regimes and procurement-based incentives will play a critical role in catalysing financial innovations, shaping markets and the quality of their own spending. Financial regulators and standard setters shape the rules of the game through compliance requirements and development of international norms. citizens, perhaps more than any of these other change agents, are the X-factor in shaping the future. Digitalization is already subjecting most people to an avalanche of information that is often hard to make sense of, let alone act on in informed, deliberate ways. Yet digitalization simultaneously provides citizens with new pathways to learn and act, in the world of finance as well as elsewhere. |
The balance of these effects will be all-important in determining the success or failure of efforts to realize the transition to sustainable development. Likewise, it will be the critical variable in determining the effects of digitalization in accelerating financing for the SDGs. Failing to empower citizens could mean continued shortfalls in the effective use of, and accountability for public financing. Financial and capital markets, likewise, would likely continue to absorb an unreasonable share of the economic cake in delivering intermediation services, that fail to take adequate account of citizens’ broader priorities and needs
| Succeeding, on the other hand, in leveraging digitalization to empower citizens to recover effective control could make the critical difference in financing the SDGs. Citizens, individually and collectively, could more effectively ensure that public and private intermediaries who use their money deliver what counts. The SDGs are, after all, no more or less than an expression of citizens’ collective interests and needs |
 “The SDGs are, after all, no more or less than an expression of citizens’ collective interests and needs“
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