Varieties of Impact Investing: Creating and Translating a Label in Local Contexts

by Philip Balsiger (Editor), Daniel Burnier (Editor), Noé Kabouche (Editor)

Overview

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

A new trend in ethical finance, impact investing aims to generate positive social or environmental impacts alongside financial returns. But what does it really mean and how is it practiced across different regions and organizations?

This volume explores the malleability of impact investing and how it overlaps with the development sphere to give finance a new role. From global networks to the Global South, it compares diverse investing practices and discourses.

Providing an original perspective on this emerging field, this is a key resource for the scholars of social studies of finance, economic sociology, management and organization studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781529238174
Publisher:	Bristol University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2025
Series:	Business, Finance and International Development
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304

About the Author

Philip Balsiger is Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland.

Daniel Burnier Lecturer at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

Noé Kabouche is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland and Sciences Po Paris, France.

Table of Contents

1. The Pursuit of Impact in the Specificities of Place and Time – Philip Balsiger, Daniel Burnier and Noé Kabouche

2. Impact and ‘Impact’: Labelling and Identity in Finance – Marc Brightman and Aneil Tripathy

Part 1: Translating the Impact Label into National and Transnational Contexts

3. Socio-genesis of the Impact Investing World in France – Eve Chiapello and Camille Roth

4. The Regional Development of an International Phenomenon: How the Geneva Financial Field Framed Impact Investing – Noé Kabouche, Philip Balsiger and Daniel Burnier

5. Impact Investing at the Aga Khan Development Network: Origins of Innovative Financing Mechanisms – Farwa Sial and Jessica Sklair

6. Leverage as a Political Tactic: The Case of Social Impact Investing in Britain – Philipp Golka

7. Social Impact Investing in Italy: A Case of Weak Financialization? – Davide Caselli

8. Top-down Plus Bottom-up: Building the Market for Impact Investing in Spain – Lisa Hehenberger and Guillermo Casanovas

Part 2: Enacting Impact in Investment Practices

9. Defining and Implementing ‘Impact’: Negotiating Meanings and Shifting Interpretations – Claudia Campisano

10. Social Impact as a Negotiated and Collective Process – Guillaume Dumont

11. The Social Structures of Impact: A Case Study of French Impact Startups – Vincent Himmer

12. Market Exchange and Power Cornerstones: Local Understandings of Impact Investing in Nigeria – Elena Christodoulou and Shonali Banerjee

13. ‘Low-hanging Mangoes’: On Social Impact Bonds in Colombia – Natalia Gómez Muñoz

14. Blockchain as an ‘Anti-politics Machine’: Web3-based Impact Investing and the Reproduction of Inequalities – Riccardo De Cristano

15. Conclusion – Emily Barman