Reconstructing Gender-Responsive Climate Finance: A Comparative Legal Study of Women’s Access to SME Financing

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a legal-design perspective on gender exclusion in climate finance, useful for scholars studying sustainable finance regulation and access to finance.

🏢実務担当者:Offers a framework for financial institutions and SMEs to design gender-responsive eligibility and reporting standards, potentially improving access to green finance.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the need to integrate gender mainstreaming into climate finance regulation and SME policies, with concrete proposals for legal reform.

Climate finance has become a central instrument in supporting the transition toward a low-carbon economy. Yet, its legal architecture often remains insufficiently responsive to gender-based inequalities in access to finance. Women-led green small and medium enterprises (SMEs) may contribute to climate mitigation, adaptation, and local economic resilience, but they frequently face structural barriers embedded in financing rules and procedures. This article examines how climate finance regulation operates as a legal gatekeeping mechanism that may substantively exclude women-led green SMEs. This study employs normative legal research, drawing on statutory, conceptual, and functional-comparative approaches. Indonesia is examined as the primary jurisdiction, while the European Union and Bangladesh are used as comparative jurisdictions based on the shared legal function of eligibility and access within sustainable finance regulation. The study analyzes primary legal instruments, sustainable finance policies, gender mainstreaming mandates, SME financing rules, and climate governance frameworks. It does not conduct empirical fieldwork; rather, it evaluates whether the existing legal architecture enables substantive access. The findings show that gender exclusion in climate finance is not merely a funding problem, but a legal design problem arising from fragmented regulation, formally neutral eligibility standards, and a weak linkage between sustainable finance, SME policy, and gender mainstreaming. The article contributes to sustainable business law by proposing a gender-responsive access framework based on proportional eligibility standards, gender- and MSME-disaggregated reporting, simplified documentation, institutional coordination, and alignment with SDGs 5, 8, and 13.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.15294/jllr.v7i3.49054first seen 2026-07-31 06:50:52 · last seen 2026-08-01 06:28:16