Regulator-led sustainable finance governance for climate-resilient development in Bangladesh through green finance participation, banking disclosure, and implementation gaps

Regulator-led sustainable finance governance has become a central mechanism through which climate-vulnerable emerging economies seek to align banking-sector credit allocation, disclosure practices, and development planning with climate-resilient growth. Bangladesh provides an analytically relevant case because Bangladesh Bank has introduced green banking guidelines, sustainable finance policies, taxonomies, environmental and social risk-management expectations, and reporting requirements to guide financial institutions toward sustainable and climate-smart banking practices. This study examines how Bangladesh’s regulator-led sustainable finance architecture is reflected in banking-sector green finance participation, sustainable finance allocation, CSR spending, ESG disclosure, and SDG engagement between 2017 and 2023. Using secondary data from Bangladesh Bank reports, regulatory documents, annual reports, and sustainability disclosures, the study combines policy document analysis, descriptive trend analysis, structured content analysis, and keyword-assisted text screening to assess sector-level patterns and compare disclosure profiles across Islamic and conventional listed banks. The findings show that Bangladesh’s sustainable finance architecture has increased sustainability visibility and reporting participation, but implementation remains uneven. Green finance and sustainable finance reporting expanded over the study period, yet in 2023 only 24 of 61 banks met the 5% green finance target and only 20 of 61 banks met the 20% sustainable finance target. CSR spending remained heavily weighted toward disaster management, environmental disclosure showed limited depth, and SDG engagement was selective rather than comprehensive. The study therefore argues that Bangladesh’s banking sector has moved from regulatory architecture to sustainability visibility, but not yet from visibility to consistent climate-finance transformation. The contribution is a non-causal institutional assessment of sustainable finance governance, disclosure presence, allocation compliance, and implementation gaps in a climate-vulnerable banking system. The 2023 compliance figures added to the abstract are already reported in the manuscript’s implementation-gap section, where the paper states that only 24 of 61 banks met the 5% green finance requirement and only 20 of 61 met the 20% sustainable finance target.