The folds of social finance: Making markets, remaking the social

Abstract

The global financial crisis acted as a spur to ‘social finance’, a loose grouping of markets demarcated on the grounds of their ostensible social purpose. This article’s critical analysis of social finance contributes to cultural economy research into marketization processes in economic geography and allied fields. First, responding to calls for greater attention to be given to heterogeneous and variegated market-making processes ‘on the ground’, social finance is analysed as a relatively discrete and hybrid modality of marketization that makes possible the valuation and capitalization of the social economy to address collective social problems. Second, moving beyond topographical accounts that understand geographies of marketization as ‘taking place’ through the outward expansion of the market’s imagined boundaries, Gilles Deleuze’s concept of ‘the fold’ is elaborated upon to develop a topological analysis of the spatial constitution of social finance markets. The folds of social finance are seams of inflection, entanglements where the social utility typically lacking from mainstream finance is variously spliced and stitched into marketization processes. In social finance markets-in-the-making, ‘the social’ is also shown to be remade as an array of thoroughly liberal associations and subjectivities that are, at once, pluralist, ethical and entrepreneurial.

Financial geography III: The financialization of the city

“…campaign finance) and securing key roles in business civic organisations.It could be argued that urban policy has become a financial instrument (Lake, 2015), or at any rate some urban policies are turned into financial instruments. Besides securitization and Real Estate Investment Trusts (or REITs – see second progress report; Aalbers, 2019a), there are a range of new financial instruments that have been implemented: tax increment financing (TIF) in the US (Kirkpatrick, 2016; Pacewicz, 2013; Teresa, 2017; Weber, 2010) and UK (Baker et al, 2016; O’Brien and Pike, 2017; Ward, 2018), sales-tax TIF in the US (Launius and Kear, 2019; Sroka, 2019), social impact bonds in the US (Lake, 2015; Rosenman, 2019; Tse and Warner, 2018) and UK (Berndt and Wirth, 2018; Dowling, 2017; Langley, 2018a), development impact bonds, managed by the World Bank (Mawdsley, 2018; Saldinger, 2016), opportunity bonds in the US (Gotham, 2016), special impact financing in the US (McCubbins and Seljan, 2018), revenue and tax anticipation notes, certificates of participation and fiscal stabilization bonds in the US (Peck and Whiteside, 2016), tender option bonds in the US (Kirkpatrick, 2016), revenue bonds and local asset backed vehicles in the UK (Strickland, 2016), lender option borrower option (LOBO) in the UK (Möller, 2016), a range of different types of interest rate derivatives across the Global North (Möller, 2016), interest rate swaps, constant maturity swaps and swaptions in Germany and Italy (Hendrikse and Sidaway, 2014; Lagna, 2015), financial engineering instruments in the European Union’s Cohesion Policy (Dąbrowski, 2014; Anguelov et al, 2018), transferable development rights in Taiwan (Yang and Chang, 2018), Certificados do Potencial Adicional de Construção (Certificates of Additional Building Rights or CEPACs) in Brazil (Fix, 2011; Mosciaro et al, 2019; Pereira, 2015; Klink and Stroher, 2017), local financing platforms in China (Pan et al, 2017), and dipiao in China (…”

ESG Integration Treats Ethics as Risk, but Whose Ethics and Whose Risk? Responsible Investment in the Context of Precarity and Risk-Shifting

“…Langley makes a related argument in his analysis of impact investment and venture philanthropy. He finds that these social finance projects are grounded on a liberal notion of ethics and entrepreneurialism (Langley, 2018: 13), and that this is generating a different kind of “social.” The argument here is consistent with Langley’s, but applies Martin’s social derivative logic, in order to reveal how ESG integration treats ethical risks as a set of potential exposures. Ethical debates are reduced to metrics that can be assessed through a financial risk-management matrix.…”

The geographies of the institutional and industrial constraints on the financialization of German brewing

“…A1Supported by the state and wider socio-institutional structures and conventions, the majority of German brewers are family-owned and -operated, adopt longer-term strategic perspectives and reflect the values and principles of the Mittelstand tradition (Carroll et al, 1993). As a participant in 'market-making' (Langley, 2018), the state has actively supported the character and structure of the market through taxation policies that favour small and medium enterprises (Howard, 2014). An encouragement towards 'patient capital' has also constrained the prioritization of short-termism and narrow financial interests (Sablowski, 2008: 135).…”