Who Controls Decisions, Narratives, and Funding — and Who Does Not
By Amb. Canon Otto
Convener, Global Sustainability Summit
Contributor, SustainabilityUnscripted
Sustainability is often presented as a technical challenge: reduce emissions, manage waste, protect biodiversity, finance the transition. These are important objectives. But beneath them lies a more uncomfortable truth that we rarely confront directly:
Sustainability has a power problem.
Who decides what gets funded?
Who shapes the narrative of what “good sustainability” looks like?
Who sets the rules, the metrics, and the priorities—and who is expected to simply adapt?
At SustainabilityUnscripted, we believe that until this power imbalance is addressed, sustainability will remain uneven, exclusionary, and, in many places, ineffective.
The Politics Behind the Planet
Sustainability is not only about carbon, waste, or nature. It is also about governance, influence, and control.
Decisions about climate finance, infrastructure investment, technology pathways, and development priorities are still overwhelmingly made in boardrooms, financial centres, and political institutions far removed from the communities most affected by environmental risk.
This creates a familiar pattern:
- Those with the least exposure to climate impacts often have the most influence over solutions.
- Those with the most exposure often have the least voice in decision-making.
As Convener of the Global Sustainability Summit, I have seen how frequently sustainability strategies are designed for communities rather than with them. The result is well-intentioned policy that lacks legitimacy, local ownership, and long-term resilience.
Narrative Power: Who Tells the Story of Sustainability?
Power is not only about money and policy. It is also about narrative.
Who defines what counts as “successful” sustainability?
Who decides which solutions are “scalable,” “bankable,” or “credible”?
Who gets visibility, and who remains invisible?
Too often, sustainability stories are told from the top down—filtered through the priorities of investors, donors, and institutions in the Global North. Meanwhile, local innovations, informal systems, and community-led solutions are treated as peripheral, experimental, or “not yet ready.”
Through SustainabilityUnscripted, we challenge this hierarchy of voices. Real sustainability will not emerge from a single narrative centre. It must be plural, contextual, and grounded in lived realities.
The Funding Gap Is a Power Gap
Nowhere is the power problem more visible than in climate and sustainability finance.
Capital flows follow influence, not necessarily impact.
Projects that fit familiar templates, reporting frameworks, and risk models are funded. Those that do not—often community-based, locally adapted, or systemically innovative—struggle to access resources, even when they address real needs more effectively.
This creates a structural bias:
- Large institutions are overrepresented in funding pipelines
- Smaller, local actors are underfunded or excluded
- Innovation is shaped by what is “financeable,” not what is most needed
At CleanCyclers, we encounter this tension directly. Circular economy and waste systems are critical to climate resilience, public health, and water protection. Yet they are frequently treated as secondary to energy projects in funding priorities—despite their profound systemic impact.
This is not just a market failure. It is a power allocation failure.
Systems Change Requires Power Redistribution
If sustainability is to move beyond surface-level progress, it must confront who holds power in:
- Setting agendas
- Designing solutions
- Allocating capital
- Defining success
Systemic change is not only technical. It is political and institutional.
This does not mean rejecting expertise or global coordination. It means rebalancing influence so that communities, cities, and regions on the frontlines of environmental risk are not merely recipients of solutions—but co-authors of them.
At the Global Sustainability Summit, this conversation is becoming unavoidable: you cannot build resilient systems on disempowered foundations.
CleanCyclers and the Question of Practical Power
At CleanCyclers, we approach sustainability through the lens of systems, infrastructure, and material flows. Waste, pollution, and resource loss are not accidents—they are the outcomes of how power and priorities are structured.
When waste systems are underfunded, it is because they are politically undervalued.
When communities live with polluted waterways, it is often because decision-making happened elsewhere.
When circular solutions struggle to scale, it is because financial and policy power has not caught up with environmental reality.
Redistributing power in sustainability means:
- Investing in local systems, not just global headlines
- Treating waste, water, and materials as strategic infrastructure
- Valuing prevention and resilience as much as mitigation
- Letting those closest to the problem shape the solution
From Participation to Influence
We often speak about “stakeholder engagement” in sustainability. But engagement without influence is not empowerment. It is consultation without consequence.
The next phase of sustainability must move from:
- Inclusion as a gesture → to inclusion as shared authority
- Participation as a checkbox → to participation as co-decision
- Representation as optics → to representation as real power
Through CanonOtto’s work and the ongoing dialogues on SustainabilityUnscripted, one message is becoming clearer: the sustainability transition will fail if it remains a top-down project.
The Real Question
The defining question of this decade is not only:
Can we decarbonise? Can we go circular? Can we protect nature?
It is also:
Who gets to decide how this transition happens—and for whom it works?
Until power is more fairly distributed across geographies, communities, and institutions, sustainability will continue to reproduce the very inequalities it claims to solve.
And that is not a technical problem.
It is a leadership problem.
