Pub Date : 2023-08-23DOI: 10.1177/0308518x231189384
Leonard Seabrooke, Saila Stausholm
Multinational enterprises (MNEs) take advantage of local differences in their global location of assets and activities. Scholarship in economic geography and international political economy associates value-producing entities organized in Global Value Chains (GVCs), and wealth-protecting entities in Global Wealth Chains (GWCs). At the aggregate level, these are often associated with different geographical manifestations, with GVCs centered around “production hubs” and GWCs around “offshore jurisdictions.” This indicates an asymmetrical geography between value and wealth with a low level of entanglement. This does not account, however, for the ways value and wealth are governed within MNEs. We investigate how the firm-territory nexus can be understood across scales and what this implies for the geographical overlap between GVCs and GWCs. While there is seemingly limited entanglement of GVC and GWC activities at the macro scale, at the meso scale there are overlaps and significant entanglement at the micro scale. This implies value and wealth are more geographically aligned than previously thought, and that initiatives aimed at regulating these chains needs to address practices within MNEs rather than targeting arbitrary geographies at the country level.
{"title":"The firm-territory nexus in a fragmented economy: Scales of global value and wealth chain entanglement","authors":"Leonard Seabrooke, Saila Stausholm","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231189384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231189384","url":null,"abstract":"Multinational enterprises (MNEs) take advantage of local differences in their global location of assets and activities. Scholarship in economic geography and international political economy associates value-producing entities organized in Global Value Chains (GVCs), and wealth-protecting entities in Global Wealth Chains (GWCs). At the aggregate level, these are often associated with different geographical manifestations, with GVCs centered around “production hubs” and GWCs around “offshore jurisdictions.” This indicates an asymmetrical geography between value and wealth with a low level of entanglement. This does not account, however, for the ways value and wealth are governed within MNEs. We investigate how the firm-territory nexus can be understood across scales and what this implies for the geographical overlap between GVCs and GWCs. While there is seemingly limited entanglement of GVC and GWC activities at the macro scale, at the meso scale there are overlaps and significant entanglement at the micro scale. This implies value and wealth are more geographically aligned than previously thought, and that initiatives aimed at regulating these chains needs to address practices within MNEs rather than targeting arbitrary geographies at the country level.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90937544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-21DOI: 10.1177/0308518x231181128
Lotte Thomsen, Karen P. Y. Lai, S. Ponte
Value and wealth creation, capture and protection are important features of contemporary global capitalism. However, global value chains and global wealth chains have been studied mostly in isolation from each other. In this article, we address this limitation by revealing the entanglements of value and wealth in the gold sector. We develop a typology of state action and inaction in value and wealth chains to explain how the state shapes the mobilisation and management of tangible and intangible assets. In our empirical analysis, we chronicle the creation of a ‘gold hub’ in Singapore that pulls together value and wealth functions, and highlight the various roles of the Singaporean state – as facilitator, deregulator-cum-redistributor, and direct actor. We show that entanglements of value and wealth are shaped by specific configurations of state action and inaction, and are built upon intangible dimensions of legal affordance and cultural practice coupled with very tangible facilities and infrastructure. Our analysis pinpoints the co-dependence of value creation and wealth protection systems as vital to processes of accumulation.
{"title":"State action and inaction in the shaping of value and wealth entanglements: The role of Singapore in the global ‘gold chain’","authors":"Lotte Thomsen, Karen P. Y. Lai, S. Ponte","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231181128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231181128","url":null,"abstract":"Value and wealth creation, capture and protection are important features of contemporary global capitalism. However, global value chains and global wealth chains have been studied mostly in isolation from each other. In this article, we address this limitation by revealing the entanglements of value and wealth in the gold sector. We develop a typology of state action and inaction in value and wealth chains to explain how the state shapes the mobilisation and management of tangible and intangible assets. In our empirical analysis, we chronicle the creation of a ‘gold hub’ in Singapore that pulls together value and wealth functions, and highlight the various roles of the Singaporean state – as facilitator, deregulator-cum-redistributor, and direct actor. We show that entanglements of value and wealth are shaped by specific configurations of state action and inaction, and are built upon intangible dimensions of legal affordance and cultural practice coupled with very tangible facilities and infrastructure. Our analysis pinpoints the co-dependence of value creation and wealth protection systems as vital to processes of accumulation.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77052963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-18DOI: 10.1177/0308518x231189391
Heather Whiteside
In this Exchanges piece, I comment on centripetal and centrifugal tendencies across social science disciplines with an eye to the possibilities and pitfalls of analytical eclecticism in bridging within-field impasse and generating cross-disciplinary dialogue germane to economic geography.
{"title":"Analytical eclecticism for vigor and rigor?","authors":"Heather Whiteside","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231189391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231189391","url":null,"abstract":"In this Exchanges piece, I comment on centripetal and centrifugal tendencies across social science disciplines with an eye to the possibilities and pitfalls of analytical eclecticism in bridging within-field impasse and generating cross-disciplinary dialogue germane to economic geography.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82996120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-15DOI: 10.1177/0308518x231191930
John Schmidt
In California, wildfires caused by electrical infrastructure have left the state’s investor-owned power utilities with major and growing liabilities. But even in such an incendiary environment, the financial industry has demonstrated that it can profit from disaster. This paper uses the 2019-2020 bankruptcy of Pacific Gas & Electric to explain how. In it, I show how “risk” in California’s electricity industry is legally constituted, mediated, and allocated. First, I explain how financial perceptions of wildfire risk in California’s electricity industry are shaped by the state’s legal and regulatory environment, and how the law is used to manage this risk. I then turn to PG&E’s bankruptcy to show how litigation functions as a financial strategy. In court, risk is endogenous to legal-financial practice. I develop the concepts of “legal arbitrage” and “leverage” to explain how law mediates the relationship between risk and finance. I adapt the concept of legal arbitrage to show how financial assets (like those in a utility with unprecedented wildfire liabilities) can possess both legal and market value, which can and often do diverge in circumstances of distress. I use the term leverage to refer to a particular kind of legal-financial power which enables actors to transfer risk away from themselves and onto others. In working through these concepts, I argue that that mainstream perceptions of risk in the financial industry are inadequate, especially in an era of increasing climate insecurity.
{"title":"Incendiary assets: Risk, power, and the law in an era of catastrophic fire","authors":"John Schmidt","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231191930","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231191930","url":null,"abstract":"In California, wildfires caused by electrical infrastructure have left the state’s investor-owned power utilities with major and growing liabilities. But even in such an incendiary environment, the financial industry has demonstrated that it can profit from disaster. This paper uses the 2019-2020 bankruptcy of Pacific Gas & Electric to explain how. In it, I show how “risk” in California’s electricity industry is legally constituted, mediated, and allocated. First, I explain how financial perceptions of wildfire risk in California’s electricity industry are shaped by the state’s legal and regulatory environment, and how the law is used to manage this risk. I then turn to PG&E’s bankruptcy to show how litigation functions as a financial strategy. In court, risk is endogenous to legal-financial practice. I develop the concepts of “legal arbitrage” and “leverage” to explain how law mediates the relationship between risk and finance. I adapt the concept of legal arbitrage to show how financial assets (like those in a utility with unprecedented wildfire liabilities) can possess both legal and market value, which can and often do diverge in circumstances of distress. I use the term leverage to refer to a particular kind of legal-financial power which enables actors to transfer risk away from themselves and onto others. In working through these concepts, I argue that that mainstream perceptions of risk in the financial industry are inadequate, especially in an era of increasing climate insecurity.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84778085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-15DOI: 10.1177/0308518x231191923
H. Yeung
This intervention elaborates on why causal explanation can serve as an indispensable building block towards robust theory development in economic geography. It argues for the critical importance of causal explanation in the subfield’s intellectual development and to its wider appeal to the social sciences. First, I show how this vital importance is premised on explanations that uncover the causal mechanisms of economic events, practices and processes that make things happen in society and space. Put differently, explanation needs causal connections as its necessary condition of explanatory power and practical adequacy. Its empirical operation is grounded in contextual contingencies and place-based specificities in an economic-geographical world characterized by complexity, multiplicity and emergence. Second, I explain why causal explanation represents a necessary step towards pragmatic research in economic geography. Our socio-spatial interventions can be better developed if we have a clearer sense of why and how carefully theorized causal mechanisms interact with contingent contexts to produce specific events and outcomes in the space-economy. Framed in this double hermeneutic sense of being both vital and pragmatic, causal explanation is critical in/to economic geography.
{"title":"Why is causal explanation critical in/to economic geography?","authors":"H. Yeung","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231191923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231191923","url":null,"abstract":"This intervention elaborates on why causal explanation can serve as an indispensable building block towards robust theory development in economic geography. It argues for the critical importance of causal explanation in the subfield’s intellectual development and to its wider appeal to the social sciences. First, I show how this vital importance is premised on explanations that uncover the causal mechanisms of economic events, practices and processes that make things happen in society and space. Put differently, explanation needs causal connections as its necessary condition of explanatory power and practical adequacy. Its empirical operation is grounded in contextual contingencies and place-based specificities in an economic-geographical world characterized by complexity, multiplicity and emergence. Second, I explain why causal explanation represents a necessary step towards pragmatic research in economic geography. Our socio-spatial interventions can be better developed if we have a clearer sense of why and how carefully theorized causal mechanisms interact with contingent contexts to produce specific events and outcomes in the space-economy. Framed in this double hermeneutic sense of being both vital and pragmatic, causal explanation is critical in/to economic geography.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91034903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-13DOI: 10.1177/0308518x231189569
Daniel Coq-Huelva, A. Higuchi, Ruth Arias-Gutiérrez, Rafaela Alfalla-Luque
This article analyses the role of conventions, compromises and even violence in the intricate bio-social construction process of cocoa cultivation in the province of Tocache in the Peruvian Amazonia. This article discusses the different phases of the settlement process and its social, institutional and environmental bases. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the dramatic abandonment of coca cultivation and its replacement by alternative crops such as cocoa. Emphasis is placed on the centrality of agents’ normative coherence and coordination. For over 50 years, the civic–market compromise has framed agents’ discourses and actions, although it has sometimes been ostensibly distorted. This framing effect has also occurred in circumstances with considerable recourse to violence and armed conflict. Thus, this article focuses not only on justification processes but also on what happens ‘after justification’ and on how violent situations can coexist with discursive constructions with a relevant normative element.
{"title":"From coca to cocoa: Conflicts, violence and hegemonic compromises in the turbulent Peruvian Amazonia settlement process: The case of Tocache","authors":"Daniel Coq-Huelva, A. Higuchi, Ruth Arias-Gutiérrez, Rafaela Alfalla-Luque","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231189569","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231189569","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses the role of conventions, compromises and even violence in the intricate bio-social construction process of cocoa cultivation in the province of Tocache in the Peruvian Amazonia. This article discusses the different phases of the settlement process and its social, institutional and environmental bases. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the dramatic abandonment of coca cultivation and its replacement by alternative crops such as cocoa. Emphasis is placed on the centrality of agents’ normative coherence and coordination. For over 50 years, the civic–market compromise has framed agents’ discourses and actions, although it has sometimes been ostensibly distorted. This framing effect has also occurred in circumstances with considerable recourse to violence and armed conflict. Thus, this article focuses not only on justification processes but also on what happens ‘after justification’ and on how violent situations can coexist with discursive constructions with a relevant normative element.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"80 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74591914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-25DOI: 10.1177/0308518x231187402
Emily Rosenman, Jessa M. Loomis, Dan Cohen, T. Baker
The introduction to this theme issue discusses a series of papers examining the increasing marketisation of social reproduction and its effects on systems that sustain human and social life. This is done by examining the frontiers, framings, and frictions that arise when market systems are constructed to enable capital accumulation in the realm of social reproduction. Frontiers identify the expansion of market logic into new areas, framings explore how financial actors attempt to bring the logic of social reproduction within the purview of market competition, and frictions highlight the various tensions that generate resistance to the roll out of market logics. Through establishing these three areas, we argue that both market structures and systems of social reproduction should be understood as geographically variegated and, at times, uncertain. This variegation necessitates an understanding of marketised social reproduction as forged through complex articulations of market and non-market logics. Using cases from surrogacy to smart electricity meters, the papers in this theme issue illustrate that while these articulations may generate benefits for some individuals, households and communities, such processes of marketisation can introduce new layers of inequity and undermine the ethical relations and social commitments that sustain life—in the service of enabling accumulation.
{"title":"Bringing life's work to market: Frontiers, framings, and frictions in marketised social reproduction","authors":"Emily Rosenman, Jessa M. Loomis, Dan Cohen, T. Baker","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231187402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231187402","url":null,"abstract":"The introduction to this theme issue discusses a series of papers examining the increasing marketisation of social reproduction and its effects on systems that sustain human and social life. This is done by examining the frontiers, framings, and frictions that arise when market systems are constructed to enable capital accumulation in the realm of social reproduction. Frontiers identify the expansion of market logic into new areas, framings explore how financial actors attempt to bring the logic of social reproduction within the purview of market competition, and frictions highlight the various tensions that generate resistance to the roll out of market logics. Through establishing these three areas, we argue that both market structures and systems of social reproduction should be understood as geographically variegated and, at times, uncertain. This variegation necessitates an understanding of marketised social reproduction as forged through complex articulations of market and non-market logics. Using cases from surrogacy to smart electricity meters, the papers in this theme issue illustrate that while these articulations may generate benefits for some individuals, households and communities, such processes of marketisation can introduce new layers of inequity and undermine the ethical relations and social commitments that sustain life—in the service of enabling accumulation.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79863970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-25DOI: 10.1177/0308518x231187389
Kristin Plys
How might we productively synthesize Marxist and postcolonial thought in order to bring questions of race and class, and imperialism and capitalism, into the same frame of analysis? In this short comment, I show how the Dar es Salam School of anti-colonial history, along with the New Indian Labour History inspired by the Dar School, can creatively bring together theoretical frameworks of different epistemes for a productive synthesis.
{"title":"Theories of capitalism and coloniality in world systems analysis, the Dar es Salaam School of history and the New Indian Labour History","authors":"Kristin Plys","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231187389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231187389","url":null,"abstract":"How might we productively synthesize Marxist and postcolonial thought in order to bring questions of race and class, and imperialism and capitalism, into the same frame of analysis? In this short comment, I show how the Dar es Salam School of anti-colonial history, along with the New Indian Labour History inspired by the Dar School, can creatively bring together theoretical frameworks of different epistemes for a productive synthesis.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78253940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-18DOI: 10.1177/0308518x231172199
G. Pratt, C. Johnston, Kelsey Johnson
What happens when caring for the ageing population is so devalued that robots are deployed to care for our elders? We examine the growing employment of companion robots in elder care as one response to a critical labour shortage and loneliness epidemic shared across the Global North. Reflecting on interviews conducted with robot engineers, researchers, NGO care providers and local government, we examine five robots under development or in use in the UK and the USA. We ask if machines providing emotional and social care signal a diminishment of what it means to be human or if robots and automation present a promising solution to our elder care crisis. We do not evaluate the efficacy of robotic technology but identify and question assumptions concerning what it means to be human in modernity and examine companion or social robots at a moment of crisis and the substantive reorganisation of social reproduction wrought by neoliberal austerity. We end by calling for a reimagining of elder care, in which the care of our elders is radically revalued and where robots assist and support workers in their difficult and skilled labour of care.
{"title":"Robots and care of the ageing self: An emerging economy of loneliness","authors":"G. Pratt, C. Johnston, Kelsey Johnson","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231172199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231172199","url":null,"abstract":"What happens when caring for the ageing population is so devalued that robots are deployed to care for our elders? We examine the growing employment of companion robots in elder care as one response to a critical labour shortage and loneliness epidemic shared across the Global North. Reflecting on interviews conducted with robot engineers, researchers, NGO care providers and local government, we examine five robots under development or in use in the UK and the USA. We ask if machines providing emotional and social care signal a diminishment of what it means to be human or if robots and automation present a promising solution to our elder care crisis. We do not evaluate the efficacy of robotic technology but identify and question assumptions concerning what it means to be human in modernity and examine companion or social robots at a moment of crisis and the substantive reorganisation of social reproduction wrought by neoliberal austerity. We end by calling for a reimagining of elder care, in which the care of our elders is radically revalued and where robots assist and support workers in their difficult and skilled labour of care.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90723519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-16DOI: 10.1177/0308518x231187409
James W. Williams
An enduring legacy of the 2007–2009 financial crisis is the growth of “social” and “impact” investing, markets dedicated to the use of financial capital to achieve social good. This paper examines one key manifestation of these markets: the social impact bond, a financial device which uses private capital to fund social programs. While social impact bond (SIBs) have been viewed as a testament to the power of finance and the “financialization” of the social sector, the paper instead highlights the struggles and limits of the SIB enterprise. Informed by a multi-year study of SIBs in Canada, the USA, and UK, and the theoretical lens of the social studies of assetization combined with an ecological approach, these struggles are conceived in terms of the challenge of operationalizing SIBs’ financial imaginary and managing the gaps between finance and the social sector as distinct ecologies. Particular emphasis is placed on three valuation devices—liquidity, risk, and rigor—which are central to this effort. Rather than “hinges” connecting these worlds, these devices have emerged as points of conflict, revealing a distinctly spatial politics which helps to explain the limits not only of SIBs but also other forms of financialization at the frontiers of (social) finance.
{"title":"Finance interrupted: Social impact bonds, spatial politics, and the limits of financial innovation in the social sector","authors":"James W. Williams","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231187409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231187409","url":null,"abstract":"An enduring legacy of the 2007–2009 financial crisis is the growth of “social” and “impact” investing, markets dedicated to the use of financial capital to achieve social good. This paper examines one key manifestation of these markets: the social impact bond, a financial device which uses private capital to fund social programs. While social impact bond (SIBs) have been viewed as a testament to the power of finance and the “financialization” of the social sector, the paper instead highlights the struggles and limits of the SIB enterprise. Informed by a multi-year study of SIBs in Canada, the USA, and UK, and the theoretical lens of the social studies of assetization combined with an ecological approach, these struggles are conceived in terms of the challenge of operationalizing SIBs’ financial imaginary and managing the gaps between finance and the social sector as distinct ecologies. Particular emphasis is placed on three valuation devices—liquidity, risk, and rigor—which are central to this effort. Rather than “hinges” connecting these worlds, these devices have emerged as points of conflict, revealing a distinctly spatial politics which helps to explain the limits not only of SIBs but also other forms of financialization at the frontiers of (social) finance.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75352999","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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