Beyond Growth: Anastasia Linn on Sustainable Finance
Is the way finance is set up the root cause of our faith in growth? Banks that create money out of thin air. Interest that requires growth somewhere in the financial system. This was one of the topics in this conversation with Anastasia Linn. Her answer surprised me.This conversation got me thinking about blame and accountability, about sustainable finance: is it even possible, and energy from your work and at the same time protecting your own energy.
Today, we are learning from Anastasia Linn.
Anastasia works at the intersection of organizational behavior, finance, and the Just Transition. Before co-founding Arketa Institute for Post-Growth Finance, she worked at organizations like the Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth, World Climate Foundation, and the House of Beautiful Business. She initiated the Exploring Postgrowth Finance project at Degrowth Switzerland and has worked across the areas of leadership, innovation, and sustainability since 2016.
Genuine sustainable finance is finance that can enable wellbeing for all within planetary boundaries.
Let's get started...
In this conversation with Anastasia Linn, I learned:
00:00 Intro -
02:15 What does Arketa stand for, and what does the business do?
05:25 Ecological economics vs. neoclassical economics.
10:45 The responsibility of finance and banks (money creation) for our obsession with growth and deciding what is made in the economy.
13:50 The incentives within the system to accumulate money and power to be safe and deeper cultural issues.
17:10 Conversations with financial professionals to get into the underlying cultural change.
19:30 Wealth equals happiness, and material goods are necessary to feel pretty, powerful, respected, or loved.
21:25 Surprised and disappointed by where the sustainable finance conversation was.
24:00 Even people who self-identify as committed impact investors are not willing to pay slightly more for exponentially more impact. (see https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhac066)
27:25 Sustainable and traditional investors are basically indistinguishable because they are applying the same logic (see paper by Edmans and Gosling below).
29:25 Do we want rich families from Europe to own the fresh water infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa? You are fulfilling a real need and at the same time extracting profit to Europe.
33:55 How her new business created a place for all that energy to go. The point is to care for herself enough to sustain that energy long term.
34:40 How can I embody our namesake of enoughness and make enough space to take care of myself?
40:15 The attention for the work and the paper of Arketa in the finance world is much more than she anticipated so soon.
41:05 When people realize that they are not alone, it makes it safer to take the next step.
45:00 The income streams for Arketa.
46:05 Do you need to be privately wealthy to try to work in Degrowth?
51:00 How do we want to manage accountability for centuries of maltreatment?
52:40 Blame is an easier position psychologically.
58:15 Going back to university to study psychology.
1:02:35 Exist at the intersection between the two systems, play by the rules a little bit, and stay connected to the new world.
1:07:30 Examples of exciting things that are happening at the fringes of the financial world. Progressive wealth holder movements like Patriotic Millionaires, Millionaires for Humanity, Good Ancestor movement and Research generation.
1:08:40 The growth independent financial system.
1:09:05 Examples of what individuals can do with their personal finance: financial activist playbook, Bank for Good, Triodos (NL) and the divest movement.
I admire her wisdom and you can see and hear this particularly from 30:20 to 35:35 is really interesting and important. What she shares is, for me, one of the main reasons to work with the Inner Development Goals.
More about Anastasia Linn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/avlinn/
www.arketa-institute.org
Reports and papers by Arketa:
The first report, an introduction to Ecological Economics and Degrowth, and what it means for finance: By Disaster or Design
The pension paper: A Path to Post-Growth Pensions
Impact report 2025
Resources shared by Anastasia:
Jasmine Rashid’s Financial Activist Discussion Zine
Miho Soon’s podcast Money Trauma
FEBEA (European Ethical Banking Network) + Bank for Good Europe + US
Renee Lertzman’s Substack, Becoming Guides
The Hidden Business Majority: From Private Support to Post-Growth Transformation Report from Jeni Miles, Dario Krpan and Fred Basso at the London School of Economics
Hans Stegeman, Chief Economist at Triodos Bank, has a Substack where he often talks about post-growth, degrowth, and wellbeing economies—definitely worth following.
An intro to progressive wealth holder movements from Michael Gast (US focus) + Also check out Good Ancestor Movement and the We Must Draw the Line coalition on reducing extreme wealth inequality.
Resources we mention in the conversation:
Not-for-profit businesses as an alternative – Jennifer Hinton
De nieuwe economie in de praktijk – Heidi Leenaarts (Dutch - on money creation)
Geld genoeg, maar niet voor jou – Thomas Bollen #boekencast afl 135 (Dutch - book on money creation process)
Money creation - Wikipedia
Steve Rocco (colleague and co-founder)
Belonging, Identity, and Decolonizing from Within – Zulfia Abawe
A connecting perspective on colonization – Rukmini Iyer
How to fix the economy – Mariana Mazzucato interview | The Exchange
Tom Gosling - Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics
Alex Edmans - professor of finance
Paper: Sustainable Investing: Evidence From the Field by Alex Edmans, Tom Gosling and Dirk Jenter
Do Investors Care about Impact? paper by Florian Heeb, Julian F Kölbel, Falko Paetzold, Stefan Zeisberger, Do Investors Care about Impact?, The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 36, Issue 5, May 2023, Pages 1737–1787, https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhac066
REAL - A Post-Growth Deal
Planet Finance (Dutch)
Patriotic Millionaires
Millionaires for Humanity
Good Ancestor movement
Resource Generation
Ethical banking movement
Academic advisory board Arketa
The Financial Activist Playbook by Jasmin Rashid
Bank for Good Europe
Video of the conversation with Anastasia Linn
https://youtu.be/9TGDn3K0aNs
Watch the conversation here https://youtu.be/9TGDn3K0aNs
Summary (created with AI)
Host Erno Hannink interviews Anastasia Linn, co-founder of the nonprofit Arketa Institute for Post Growth Finance (“arketa” meaning “enough” in Greek), which aims to normalize finance-industry conversations about limits to growth and develop ideas for growth-independent finance grounded in ecological economics rather than neoclassical economics.
Linn critiques mainstream sustainable finance and tools like ESG integration and impact investing as largely embedded in the same extractive logic that drives inequality and ecological overshoot, and discusses how bank money creation and lending criteria reinforce growth imperatives and unequal outcomes.
She explains her path into sustainable finance via science communication in Switzerland, describes how the work energizes her while requiring self-care, and notes Arketa’s early traction with industry audiences despite limited funding.
They discuss accountability versus blame, the need for credentials to bridge systems, and encouraging movements such as ethical banking and progressive wealth-holder redistribution, plus practical individual actions beyond financial capital.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Erno Hannink: Today you're listening to the conversation with Anastasia Linn. Anastasia works at the intersection of organizational behavior, finance, and the just transition. Before co-founding Akata Institute for Post Growth Finance, she worked, , at organizations like the Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth, World Climate Foundation, and the House of Beautiful Business.
She initiated the Exploring Post Growth Finance project at Degrowth Switzerland and has worked across the areas of leadership, innovation, and sustainability since 2016. It was a wonderful conversation, and I'm so grateful for the wisdom that Anastasia shared and showed in this conversation, and I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I did during this conversation.
My name is Erno Hanoink, and I share my knowledge, expertise, and experience with you. I coach entrepreneurs to make better decisions that will help them to grow their impact. Let's get started.
Welcome to this new podcast ep- episode. Today I'm talking to Anastasia Linn. Welcome, Anastasia.
[00:01:34] Anastasia Linn: Thank you so much.
[00:01:35] Erno Hannink: Or, or Anastasia.
[00:01:38] Anastasia Linn: Yeah, either is fine.
[00:01:39] Erno Hannink: Yeah. We're gonna talk about a lot of things. We're gonna talk about, you know, post-growth, degrowth, green finance, and stuff like that, so when you're listening you have, like, an idea where we're going.
But we're gonna find out more about what you do because let's go start from Arketa, your business. What does it stand for and what does it do?
[00:02:02] Anastasia Linn: Yeah. So first off, I'd say we consider ourselves a think tank. We're a nonprofit in the US, and in the process of establishing ourselves as a association in, in Switzerland, so just a small distinction.
We're not really a business as such. That being said, Arketa, our namesake word, means enough in Greek. So our full name is Arketa Institute for Post Growth Finance, and we kind of liked picking up that word because we're talking about enoughness in a number of ways. We think that there are objectively enough resources for everyone to live a good life within
