 A planetary geography of social impact investingEmily Rosenman Chapter 24 in Handbook on Financialisation and Space, 2026, pp 431-445 from Edward Elgar Publishing Abstract: This chapter surveys the contemporary literature and recent developments in social impact investing (SII), or private investments made with the intent to create social change or public benefits, which are often backstopped by state and/or philanthropic actors. After an overview of the literature on SII's spatialisation and power dynamics, I analyse contemporary political backlash against SII and use these contestations as lenses to distil some of SII's financial and ideological underpinnings. Inspired by postcolonial critiques of the planetary urbanisation literature, I foreground the colonial and settler-colonial relationships that underwrite SII's conditions of possibility alongside capitalist logics and neoliberal policymaking. Through two examples, I illustrate how SII produces new spaces of financial accumulation by targeting the social needs and territories of historically expropriated peripheries. SII illustrates the necessity of understanding financialisation through the speculative social futures that financial actors seek to engender through blurring the boundaries between private profit-making and social change. Keywords: Social Impact Investing; Colonialism; Financialisation; Power (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:23133_24 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing |
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