Growth at All Costs Is Not Prosperity: Reflections From Ethical Finance Global.

Published: 2024  |  Perspective updated: 2025

“Growth at all costs does not mean we are prosperous.”

That line, from economist Tim Jackson at the Global Ethical Finance Initiative's annual summit in Edinburgh, was one of those moments where a sentence lands and stays with you. It sounds obvious stated plainly. It is anything but obvious in how financial systems are currently designed and measured.

I came away from Ethical Finance Global 2024 — the ninth edition of GEFI's flagship annual summit, held in Edinburgh under the theme Progress or Procrastination? — with several things I have been thinking about since. Some are strategic. Some are urgent. One or two are genuinely unsettling in the best possible way.

The GDP question

Tim Jackson's broader point — that GDP growth is a poor proxy for human flourishing, and that a financial system built around maximising it will consistently produce outcomes that damage the things we actually care about — is not new. But it does not seem to get old in the financial services context, because the system keeps producing the same results.

Ethical Finance Global 2024 tackled the ways in which market forces, geopolitical uncertainty, and regulatory pressure are either catalysing or justifying delay on the transition to a more sustainable financial system. The honest framing — progress or procrastination — reflects something real about the current moment. There is enough ambition in the room to make things feel hopeful. There is also enough institutional inertia and short-termism to make you worried.

What Jackson's argument invites is a more serious engagement with what finance is actually for. Not as an abstract philosophical question but as a practical one: what does it mean to deploy capital well? What outcomes should we be measuring? And who gets to define prosperity?

The ecological dimension

One of the more striking moments in the day was a statistic about coral reefs. At two degrees of warming, 90% of coral reefs are projected to bleach and die. Coral reefs provide protein for approximately one billion people. This is not a distant consequence. It is a near-term supply chain and food security risk that the financial system is currently pricing very inadequately.

The framing of climate change as primarily a risk management issue for financial institutions is useful — it gets the conversation into boardrooms and risk committees. But it also has a limit. Risk management framing tends to focus on what might happen to the institution. The coral reef statistic is a reminder that what is at stake is not primarily portfolio exposure. It is the conditions for human life at scale.

Satya Tripathi's observation that the illiterate of the 21st century will be those who cannot unlearn and relearn is directly relevant here. The assumptions baked into financial modelling, investment mandates, and corporate strategy were built for a different set of conditions. Updating them requires not just new data but genuine cognitive flexibility — the willingness to revise views that have served institutions well until now.

Africa and the investment gap

One of the things I found myself nodding along to most strongly was a point about investment in Africa. Emerging market funds — the primary vehicle through which global capital flows to African markets — are structurally inadequate for the kind of patient, contextual, relationship-driven investment that actually builds sustainable businesses on the continent.

Africa holds an estimated $4 trillion in capital, including nearly $1 trillion within institutional investors that remains relatively underutilised. The gap is not primarily a supply of capital problem. It is a problem of how capital is structured, what timeframes it operates on, and whether the people deploying it have the relationships and contextual knowledge to deploy it well.

The point Rachel Aron made about this at the conference is something I see echoed in other contexts: the investment frameworks developed in and for European and North American markets are not simply transplantable to markets with different infrastructures, different risk profiles, and different growth trajectories. Building the right investment vehicles for African markets requires genuinely different thinking, not scaled-down versions of existing ones.

On holding institutions accountable

Perhaps the most generative moment of the day was a challenge posed by one of the panellists: when evaluating whether an institution's goals are genuinely serving common interests, ask who specifically benefits, and whether the logic holds under scrutiny. Good governance questions. Accountability questions. The kind of questions that feel uncomfortable to ask and important to ask anyway.

Ethical finance is not primarily a product category or a reporting framework. It is a set of questions about who financial systems serve, who they exclude, and what they optimise for. Conferences like GEFI's work best when they create the space for those questions to be asked seriously — not as a provocation, but as a genuine basis for rethinking how capital flows and what it builds.

I came away energised. I also came away with a list of things I want to keep thinking about. Which is probably the best a conference can do.