Cancan Wang (cawa@itu.dk) and Qiuyu Jiang (qiji@itu.dk), IT University Copenhagen, Denmark: Beyond Compliance: SME-Led ESG Coalitions and the Politics of Data Infrastructure

ESG has become a key site through which the EU seeks to govern corporate conduct, particularly after the regulatory reforms that expanded sustainability disclosure obligations. Most infrastructures built in response to these reforms target large, listed firms. Yet an emerging set of initiatives involves SMEs and their intermediaries, who mobilize around ESG not because they are legally required to but because they anticipate future demands for visibility, credibility, and market access. These initiatives are rarely individual firm-led; instead, they form coalitions involving diverse stakeholders such as investors, business associations, and SMEs themselves. ESG data becomes the central object through which these coalitions are organized, negotiated and sustained. These developments make these coalitions an overlooked but analytically significant site for studying the technopolitics of sustainable finance. ESG data infrastructures embody contestations over whose understandings of sustainability count, whose labor supports the system, and who reaps the benefits of data-driven governance.

We approach these questions through a technopolitical lens, examining how ESG data infrastructures encode institutional priorities, assign expertise, and redistribute (or reinforce) authority. Rather than seeing ESG data infrastructures as neutral, we treat them as political artifacts that stabilize particular futures while foreclosing others. This framing allows us to interrogate how sustainable finance oscillates between reproducing neoliberal logics and gesturing toward post-neoliberal alternatives. The paper draws on action research and collaborative co-design conducted with SMEs and their stakeholders as we attempted to build a collective ESG data infrastructure for SMEs. This work involved defining indicators, negotiating data standards, and experimenting with governance arrangements. These processes reveal the frictions that shape coalition formation, the competing demands of regulatory anticipation and resource scarcity, and the moral and economic claims actors mobilize to justify participation.

The methodological choice to work through co-design is grounded in the fact that sustainable finance is a field where political contestation is enacted through technical work. Co-design enables us to participate in those contests and observe how actors articulate obligations, resist burdens, and reconfigure relations of authority. This vantage point makes visible the subtle mechanisms through which technopolitical power circulates: the tacit hierarchies that emerge around data and sustainability expertise, the ways in which knowledge proximity becomes a mode of governance, and the relational compromises that sustain collaboration.

Our argument advances two contributions. First, we conceptualize ESG coalition formation not as network expansion or compliance diffusion but as the emergence of relational obligations: informal, negotiated commitments that bind actors despite the absence of formal enforcement. Second, we demonstrate that action research offers a distinctive methodological pathway for studying the technopolitics of sustainable finance, revealing how seemingly mundane technical decisions in data structure, governance workflow, or reporting logic become consequential moments where power is redistributed and futures are shaped.