This final article in a three-part series explores how to navigate resistance to systemic change. Drawing on personal experience, it outlines a framework for resilience—building alliances, embracing interdisciplinary thinking, and storytelling—empowering leaders to persist through setbacks and turn persistent “no” into transformative, collective “yes.”

This second article in a three-part series reframes climate change as volatility rather than warming. Drawing on finance and systems thinking, it explores how risk pricing, redesigned economic incentives, and nature-based solutions can build resilience, urging leaders to manage climate as the ultimate systemic risk.

Written by Ken Coulson, a former global finance executive turned sustainability strategist, this first article in a three-part series explores humanity’s origins as a cosmic accident. It reframes Earth’s natural systems as a fragile inheritance under threat, urging a shift from extraction to stewardship through a unifying cosmic perspective on climate, responsibility, and systemic change.

An edited volume applying Doughnut Economics to business design, using case studies and critical reflections to examine how purpose, networks, governance, ownership and finance can support regenerative and distributive business models. It focuses on redesigning firms to operate within ecological and social limits.

This article argues that modern investment strategies fuel economic extraction while often underperforming simpler alternatives. It calls on investors to realign portfolios with productive, community-oriented investments that generate real economic and social value.

This report examines how solidarity economy organisations can be resourced through wealth redistribution, arguing they are underfunded, misrecognised and poorly served by conventional investment models. It recommends reparative, community-led financing and ecosystem support rather than profit-focused, repayable finance.

Decolonising Economics is a UK-based initiative that analyses how colonial legacies shape economic and financial systems, promoting racial justice and wealth redistribution. It delivers workshops, research and strategic advice to support solidarity economy models and empower marginalised communities through community ownership, reparative finance and alternative economic frameworks.

The article argues that today’s rapid global crises (political, ecological, and social) are the visible outcomes of long-building systemic pressures. Using complexity science and systemic risk analysis, it highlights how understanding these deep drivers can help societies both anticipate crises and accelerate positive, transformative change.

This study models the financial system’s role in climate transition using participatory system dynamics with Dutch financial actors. It identifies reinforcing feedbacks like learning, technological lock-in, finance culture and passive investment and proposes seventeen policy and institutional interventions to redirect capital towards sustainable assets and align finance with Paris Agreement goals.

The report reflects on UK research mapping about 2,000 organisations building alternative economic futures and examines funding challenges. It urges funders and wealth holders to reconsider investment practices, support ecosystem development, and allocate resources towards initiatives fostering regenerative, equitable economic models and systemic change.

This CGAP Focus Note presents a framework classifying gender norms by strength and prevalence to address barriers to women’s financial inclusion. Drawing on diagnostics in Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, it outlines four intervention strategies for development and market actors to transform financial systems and advance women’s economic empowerment.

This article presents systems-informed stewardship as a new approach to advancing sustainability across the finance sector. It outlines two interdependent lenses and three practical shifts, embedding responsibility, designing for complexity, and managing adaptively to improve stewardship effectiveness.

The report proposes integrating mission-oriented policy with Global Public Investment to unblock climate and biodiversity finance. It argues for predictable, equitable public funding, shared decision-making, reduced debt reliance, and reforms such as a Climate and Biodiversity Marshall Plan and redesigned debt-for-nature swaps.

This report argues that climate change poses systemic risks to diversified portfolios and that conventional ESG engagement is insufficient. It proposes investor-led, enterprise-agnostic “guardrails” to limit greenhouse gas emissions, protect overall economic value, and complement inadequate regulation.

This article applies a systems lens to stewardship, arguing that fragmented intermediation and entrenched short-term time horizons undermine sustainability outcomes. It calls for recognising these structural barriers as a critical step toward more effective, systems-informed stewardship.

This series presents the Doughnut Economics framework, which assesses economic progress by balancing social foundations with ecological limits. It provides a structured approach to understanding whether human activity meets essential needs while remaining within planetary boundaries, supporting analysis, comparison and application across global, national and local contexts.