Introduction The financial sector can influence the speed of sustainability transitions by producing information on investment opportunities and allocating capital. Further, the financial sector can contribute to trading, diversifying and managing risk, and investors can monitor investments and actively influence cooperate governance (Schoenmaker and Schramade 2019). The financial sector thus has an important role to play in accelerating sustainability transitions. The relationship between the financial sector and sustainable development is multifaceted and can be viewed from different perspectives. Looking from within the sector, it is important to understand that expectations on risk and return usually are at the center of investors’ decisions. The financial sector has come to realize that unsustainable development, as showcased by climate change, gives rise to unfavorable risks. In this sense, financial actors have an intrinsic motivation to promote sustainable development. However, moving from motivation to sustainable investment decisions can become confounded by the free-rider incentives inherent to global commons. While climate change may still be attracting most attention within the sector, other elements of sustainable development such as biodiversity conservation and social welfare are increasingly being recognized as relevant as well. From an outside perspective, the financial sector is often seen as a lever for sustainable development. In this case, the rational is that sustainability can be promoted by consciously investing in opportunities that promise to do good. However, especially for lay people it can be hard to fully grasp whether a financial product that is commercialized under a sustainability theme actually has any sustainability impact on the ground. So called taxonomies that govern sustainable finance are currently being designed in many parts of the world to solve this problem and avoid green-washing. Zooming out further, a finance divide becomes visible with less than 3% of sustainable finance invested in low-income countries, thus bypassing those in greatest need (OECD 2022). The objective is to develop a better understanding of the sustainable finance sector and its governance and to identify research niches. The next section presents an overview of key elements of the sustainable finance universe. In section 3, we then dive deeper into selected components of this universe: public and private governance, landscape and impact finance. Section 4 presents results of a screening exercise that investigates to what extent academic literature on sustainable finance already exists and which authors have published most actively in the field.