Anchoring materiality: accounting infrastructures for the green transition

Sustainability reporting standards are undergoing rapid transformation at the transnational level. Once dominated by voluntary private initiatives, reporting is increasingly shaped by efforts to construct mandatory standards and a ‘global baseline’ of corporate disclosure. Central to this process is a conflict over materiality: whether sustainability reporting should prioritize climate-related financial risks to investors or transparency about corporate impacts on people and the environment. This paper examines how standard-setters contest and cooperate around materiality, and how these struggles shape whose interests become included or excluded in the emerging infrastructure of sustainability reporting. Using a mixed-methods research design, the findings demonstrate how the infrastructural power of financial reporting constrains sustainability reporting, thereby anchoring it to financial materiality and investor-oriented governance. This has transformed double materiality into an add-on to financial materiality rather than an alternative framework. As a result, the emerging reporting infrastructure favors the management of climate risks to investor portfolios over accountability for corporate impacts. The paper contributes to international political economy debates on financial infrastructures, standard-setting, and the governance of the green transition by showing how technical coordination around standards shapes what counts, and therefore becomes actionable, in the green transition of finance.