Varieties of Impact Investing
Creating and Translating a Label in Local Contexts
Edited by Philip Balsiger, Daniel Burnier and Noé Kabouche
Published
Sep 1, 2025Page count
304 pagesBrowse the series
Business, Finance and International DevelopmentISBN
978-1529238174Dimensions
234 x 156 mmImprint
Bristol University Press
Varieties of Impact Investing
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
A new trend in ethical finance, impact investing aims to generate positive social or environmental impacts alongside financial returns. But what does it really mean and how is it practiced across different regions and organizations?
This volume explores the malleability of impact investing and how it overlaps with the development sphere to give finance a new role. From global networks to the Global South, it compares diverse investing practices and discourses.
Providing an original perspective on this emerging field, this is a key resource for the scholars of social studies of finance, economic sociology, management and organization studies.
Philip Balsiger is Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland.
Daniel Burnier Lecturer at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
Noé Kabouche is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland and Sciences Po Paris, France.
1. The Pursuit of Impact in the Specificities of Place and Time – Philip Balsiger, Daniel Burnier and Noé Kabouche
2. Impact and ‘Impact’: Labelling and Identity in Finance – Marc Brightman and Aneil Tripathy
Part 1: Translating the Impact Label into National and Transnational Contexts
3. Socio-genesis of the Impact Investing World in France – Eve Chiapello and Camille Roth
4. The Regional Development of an International Phenomenon: How the Geneva Financial Field Framed Impact Investing – Noé Kabouche, Philip Balsiger and Daniel Burnier
5. Impact Investing at the Aga Khan Development Network: Origins of Innovative Financing Mechanisms – Farwa Sial and Jessica Sklair
6. Leverage as a Political Tactic: The Case of Social Impact Investing in Britain – Philipp Golka
7. Social Impact Investing in Italy: A Case of Weak Financialization? – Davide Caselli
8. Top-down Plus Bottom-up: Building the Market for Impact Investing in Spain – Lisa Hehenberger and Guillermo Casanovas
Part 2: Enacting Impact in Investment Practices
9. Defining and Implementing ‘Impact’: Negotiating Meanings and Shifting Interpretations – Claudia Campisano
10. Social Impact as a Negotiated and Collective Process – Guillaume Dumont
11. The Social Structures of Impact: A Case Study of French Impact Startups – Vincent Himmer
12. Market Exchange and Power Cornerstones: Local Understandings of Impact Investing in Nigeria – Elena Christodoulou and Shonali Banerjee
13. ‘Low-hanging Mangoes’: On Social Impact Bonds in Colombia – Natalia Gómez Muñoz
14. Blockchain as an ‘Anti-politics Machine’: Web3-based Impact Investing and the Reproduction of Inequalities – Riccardo De Cristano
15. Conclusion – Emily Barman
