Organic finance offers a path from consultation to genuine learning, bringing culture, ethics and local knowledge into development.
The World Bank has made important progress in recognising that development is not achieved by economics alone. Its work on social cohesion, community-driven development and locally led climate action increasingly acknowledges trust, participation, Indigenous knowledge and local decision-making. Its current Locally Led Climate Action approach explicitly seeks to combine climate science with Indigenous knowledge and to devolve finance and decision-making towards communities. The Bank has also developed a serious engagement with faith organisations. It recognises that religious actors provide health, education and social protection, influence social norms, possess moral authority and can strengthen accountability and political commitment. These are significant advances. But they do not yet go far enough.
From stakeholders to sources of knowledge
The next stage should move from respecting faith communities as stakeholders to recognising them as potential sources of development knowledge. That distinction is fundamental. Respect can still preserve an unequal relationship
There is a subtle danger in the present development language of “engaging” faith communities. The expert institution retains the theory, methodology and financial model; local communities provide legitimacy, implementation capacity, behavioural influence and contextual knowledge. In effect:
the development institution knows; the community is consulted. This can become unintentionally patronising. The Bank’s own description of faith partnerships emphasises service provision, advocacy, social norms and political will. These are important roles. But much less attention is given to the possibility that religious and civilisational traditions might actually challenge the assumptions embedded within development economics and finance themselves. A faith community is therefore welcomed into the room, but normally after the meaning of development, investment, growth, risk, value and return has already been defined.
This matters because development finance remains substantially organised around concepts inherited from modern capitalist economics: investment, productivity, financial returns, markets, bankability, private-capital mobilisation and economic growth. These tools have considerable value. The problem arises when they become the unquestioned framework within which all other knowledge must fit. The urgent challenge is not to discard them. It is to pluralise the epistemology within which they operate.
Beyond financial metrics: Learning from religious wisdom
Consider what religious traditions could teach development finance. Jain philosophy offers an illuminating example. Its principal concepts include ahiṃsā, the disciplined avoidance of harm; aparigraha, restraint and non-possessiveness; and anekāntavāda, recognition of the many-sided character of reality. Scholarly accounts emphasise non-violence, self-restraint and epistemic plurality as core features of Jain thought.
These are not merely private religious beliefs. They generate powerful economic questions and frameworks – the Jains remain India’s leading development and business entrepreneurs and economists with a heritage of several thousand years of expertise. Ahiṃsā asks development financiers to trace harms throughout an investment chain rather than externalise them because they occur far from the financial transaction. Aparigraha asks something modern finance finds remarkably difficult to ask:
How much is enough? It challenges the assumption that continuous accumulation is inherently desirable.
Anekāntavāda questions epistemic monopoly. An econometric model, a community narrative, ecological knowledge and lived experience may each reveal different aspects of reality. No single representation should claim completeness. Work on Ethical Finance has additionally connected Jain practice with trust, interdependence, long-termism, community enterprise, philanthropy and recognition of the limits as well as the possibilities of finance. The point is not that the World Bank should “adopt a certain religious tradition.” It is that its experts should be asking:
What might this knowledge tradition see that our development model does not?
That is a completely different posture from stakeholder consultation. Development experts need retraining. This requires investment in people. Economists and development-finance professionals do not need to become theologians or anthropologists. But they do need methodological and cultural bilingualism. A future development professional should understand how to combine:
quantitative evidence with ethnography; financial appraisal with institutional history; climate science with local ecological knowledge; economic incentives with moral motivations; and project evaluation with community narratives.
World Bank practice is already moving in this direction in locally led climate action. Recent Bank work explicitly argues that scientific data create greater impact when combined with local knowledge and community deliberation. The same principle should now move from climate projects into core development-finance training.
Experts should routinely learn to ask:
• What does prosperity mean here?
• Where does trust reside?
• What does the community consider legitimate?
• What obligations are owed to future generations?
• How are wealth, debt and stewardship understood?
• Which forms of value cannot sensibly be monetised?
• Whose knowledge disappeared when the project became a spreadsheet?
This is not anti-scientific. It is better science through epistemic humility. The Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability framework (PEFA) provides an immediate opportunity. The PEFA is one of the most important infrastructures for assessing public financial management. Its seven pillars, 31 indicators and 94 dimensions provide disciplined analysis of budget reliability, transparency, assets and liabilities, fiscal strategy, budget execution, accounting, reporting and external scrutiny. Its strengths should be retained. But PEFA largely measures the visible architecture of public finance. It says much less about the cultural and moral soil in which that architecture operates. Two countries can possess similar procurement regulations, audit procedures and reporting systems while differing dramatically in:
• trust,
• attitudes towards public service,
• willingness to challenge authority,
• community participation,
• informal institutions,
• conceptions of stewardship,
• and perceptions of legitimacy.
These differences may determine whether formally identical systems actually work. PEFA already demonstrates that supplementary frameworks are possible. Gender-responsive PFM adds nine indicators across the budget cycle, while PEFA Climate extends analysis towards climate-responsive public financial management. The precedent therefore exists.
The next innovation should be a voluntary PEFA Culture and Moral Environment Supplement. It could examine cultural context, trust and legitimacy, public-service ethos, ethical voice and conscience, belief traditions, community accountability, informal institutions, stewardship, resilience and institutional reflexivity. The purpose would emphatically not be to rank religions or cultures. It would ask whether public institutions understand the society in which they operate.
From culturally sensitive to culturally intelligent finance
This is where the philosophy explained in my latest book Organic Finance (Routledge, 2025) can help. Organic Finance argues that finance is not an autonomous technical science. It is embedded in society, culture, morality, relationships and nature. Development finance therefore cannot simply ask:
Is the project bankable?
What kind of society does this finance help create?
Nor is transparency sufficient if people cannot understand the information. Compliance is insufficient if institutional culture suppresses conscience. Growth is insufficient if communities lose ecological resilience. Consultation is insufficient if experts never allow local wisdom to challenge the original model. The World Bank’s evolving emphasis on putting people first, strengthening social cohesion and devolving climate decisions already contains the seeds of this transformation.
The task now is to take the next intellectual step. Faith and Indigenous wisdom should not merely be respected by development finance. They should be allowed to educate it. That requires humility from powerful institutions. But humility is not weakness. For an institution confronting climate instability, inequality, distrust and social fragmentation, it may be one of the most important forms of professional competence. The future of development finance should therefore be neither anti-market nor anti-science. It should be plural, reflexive, culturally intelligent, morally responsible and accountable to life. The World Bank has the scale to make that transformation consequential. The question is whether it is prepared not only to teach development—but also to learn. The first step would be to engage with indigenous wisdom about different perspectives on development, and the relative importance of conventional money and finance in defining their growth and progress. Perhaps the best development aid the Bank could give is to encourage each culture to protect their own heritage before trying to develop their lives and jobs in an ignorant, arrogant or condescending manner.
The International Partnership on Religion and Sustainable Development: Integrating cultural and faith-based knowledge into development finance
PaRD could play a practical role in advancing this agenda in two ways. First, it could facilitate the development of a research-based culture and faith addendum to the PEFA framework, examining how cultural contexts, moral values and faith traditions shape public financial management. Second, PaRD could help strengthen the capacity of development finance professionals to engage with faith and culture beyond treating them as variables, promoting interdisciplinary approaches that bring together financial expertise, social sciences and knowledge rooted in local communities.
