Crowdsourcing: Citizen Participation in Finance

The opacity of the financial markets challenges us as citizens. The cascading financial arrangements leave us perplexed. Is this sector seriously in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? We all know that ‘money is the key’! We will need money to finance new, more environmentally friendly activities. This chapter shows how to involve civil society and more specifically citizens in the financing of this energy and sustainable transition, through the process of ‘crowdsourcing’. Unfortunately, the involvement of citizens in finance has been discarded for several decades in order to avoid any ethical questioning of the sector. Indeed, citizens are well known for challenging and informing about potential abuses of certain institutions. However, the sustainability of the sector must pass by more ‘accountability’ of the actors who compose it in front of these societal stakes. While many think that make economic, social and environmental issues cannot coexist, the history of finance suggests the opposite. There have already been several experimentations of more responsible financial tools. The financial sector’s commitment to human-scale projects that bring about societal innovations is essential in order to reach SDGs. The crowd allows a better representation of civil society for a better efficiency in the financing provided. During these support and financing phases, the projects financed are qualified as ‘collective’ as several stakeholders work in the formalization, start-up and monitoring of their activity. In the end, isn’t the role of finance to be a tool at the service of entrepreneurial projects carried out collectively by all parties? Responsible financial actors—for example, ethical finance, participatory finance (or crowdfunding) and solidarity finance—even if they are not numerous enough, demonstrate that an alternative exists. This type of finance has integrated citizen participation for a long time and offers sustainability prospects to the financial sector. In this chapter, we will show that this citizen-based approach could provide a basis for the financing of SDGs.