Impact investors: The ethical financialization of development, society and nature

With increasing numbers of investors rejecting the notion that they face a binary choice between investing for maximum risk-adjusted returns or donating for social purpose, the impact investment market is at a significant turning point as it enters the mainstream. Impact investment thereby diverges in important ways from ‘the more mature field of socially responsible investments, which generally seek to minimize negative impact rather than proactively create positive social or environmental benefit’. Impact funds are marketed to investors through prospectuses and strategies that focus on a particular asset class, and they aggregate investments in the enterprises or projects of a specific kind of impact, sector, and/or geographic location. Impact investing is the financial face of philanthro-capitalism. Impact investment is being mobilized in social policy-making, something that has received particular attention from social scientists. For impact investors, explicitly moral, often highly emotive, storytelling is an essential aspect of value generation