Abstract
This article systematically reviews literature at the intersection of crowdfunding and sustainability. It analyzes the extent to which the current research foci in crowdfunding and sustainability contribute to unleashing the potential of crowdfunding for sustainable development. The findings highlight that the research field has a relatively short history but already shows signs of growing maturity. With regard to the research foci, the results reveal misbalances between the relevance ascribed to various aspects in research and in practice. For example, the research primarily deals with the types of crowdfunding that make up the smallest shares of the crowdfunding volume. Likewise, a research gap related to the post-funding phase as well as to environmental oriented projects is identified. On this basis, it is recommended to focus future research on the impact of crowdfunding projects on staying within the planetary boundaries and on crowdfunding projects dealing with environmental issues or integrating the social and environmental dimension of sustainability. Additionally, the potential of crowdfunding as a legitimizing function for sustainable ventures needs to be researched.
Highlights
There is increasing agreement about the high relevance of addressing urgent environmental and social problems, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and global injustice (e.g., Rockström et al 2009; Tan 2014; Dempsey 2015)
The temporal evolution of the research field unfolded as follows: The first article addressing the intersection between sustainability and crowdfunding was published in 2011; no further paper on sustainability and crowdfunding was published until 2013 (Fig. 2)
5 Discussion and conclusions for future research. The results of this systematic literature review demonstrate that the research field at the interface of crowdfunding and sustainability has not yet been extensively studied
Summary
There is increasing agreement about the high relevance of addressing urgent environmental and social problems, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and global injustice (e.g., Rockström et al 2009; Tan 2014; Dempsey 2015). As a relatively new financing mechanism, crowdfunding is increasingly expected to be able to close this funding gap and, to contribute to sustainable development (e.g., Hörisch 2015; Jovanovic 2018). Crowdfunding is most commonly defined as “the efforts by entrepreneurial individuals and groups—cultural, social, and for-profit—to fund their ventures by drawing on relatively small contributions from a relatively large number of individuals using the internet, without standard financial intermediaries” The empirical importance of crowdfunding in financing new ventures (whether sustainability-oriented or conventional) is growing rapidly, and crowdfunding is expected to reach a global volume of USD 90 billion in 2020 (Messeni Petruzzelli et al 2019)
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