Financialisation, Social Impact Bonds and the making of new market spaces in social policy

Abstract

Social Impact Investing (SII) is a mechanism by which governments seek to access and mobilise the resources of private for-profit and philanthropic capital to finance a range of social policies. SII is used increasingly but remains relatively under-examined conceptually, empirically and particularly geographically. This chapter explores the ways in which SII represents a distinctive process of extensive financialisation that creates new financialised market space within social welfare programmes. In doing so, the chapter examines how SII forges new financial chains of value that transform geographically rooted ‘problem’ populations and welfare delivery into investable products linked to distant mobile national and global financial market actors. Through this spatially transformative financial shift, it is argued that the SII starting point of finance capital for welfare provision instead results in appropriating additional public resources for finance capital