From the School Yard to the Conservation Area: Impact Investment across the Nature/Social Divide

Abstract

In the face of planetary crises, from inequality to biodiversity loss, “impact investing” has emerged as a vision for a new, “moral” financial system where investor dollars fund socio‐environmental repair while simultaneously generating financial returns. In support of this system elite actors have formed a consensus that financial investments can have beneficial, more‐than‐financial outcomes aimed at solving social and environmental crises. Yet critical geographers have largely studied “green” and “social” finance separately. We propose, instead, a holistic geography of impact investing that highlights the common methods used in attempts to offset destructive investments with purportedly reparative ones. This involves interrogating how elite‐led ideas of social and environmental progress are reflected in investments, as well as deconstructing the “objects” of impact investments. As examples, we use insights from both “green” and “social” literatures to analyse the social values embedded in projects of financialisation in schooling and affordable housing in the US.

Financing Reparative Climate Infrastructures: Capital Switching, Repair, and Decommodification

“…Critical geographers have detailed the contradictions and negative impacts of attempts to manage social and environmental crises through financial and market mechanisms (Bigger and Dempsey 2018). These mechanisms tend to prioritise particular landscape features, ecosystem functions or species over others according to technocratic or profit-oriented criteria (Bryant 2019;Cohen and Rosenman 2020;Dempsey 2016). Promising to bridge the funding gaps of austere states, financial innovations celebrate the potential for accumulation, good public relations, and light-touch regulation that gestures toward "sustainability".…”

Geographical education I: fields, interactions and relationships

“…Research attention on the geographies of education has expanded rapidly in quantity and scope (Waters, 2016). Part of this expansion includes generative synergies across multiple diverse areas of research, including: critical geographies of education, radical youth work and participatory research (Dickens, 2017); shifting infrastructures, financial capital and geographies of schooling (Cohen and Rosenman, 2020); cultural and affective geographies (Ang and Ho, 2019); critical race theory (Hunter, 2020); children’s and young people’s geographies (Baillie Smith et al, 2016); and educational landscapes, neoliberalism and the ‘social reproduction of enduring regimes of power’ (Holloway and Kirby, 2019: 164), often understanding ‘schools as key sites at which issues such as power, identity, citizenship and participation are illuminated’ (Pini et al, 2017: 14). Holloway et al, (2010) draw attention to the ways in which unruly neoliberal logics, government policy and market responses from individuals and companies might be productively explored through the geographies of education, offering an example of Thiem’s (2009) argument that education is not a ‘discrete topical speciality’ but instead is a resource for decentred and outward-looking research, ‘one in which education systems, institutions, and practices are positioned as useful sites for a variety of theory-building projects’ (p.154).…”

Reimagining geographies of public finance

“…In the wider discourse, the idea that public institutions should work to support the profitability of private finance becomes depolicitized and naturalized. Geographers and others have observed this tendency, for example, in tax regimes that increasingly serve as strategic spaces for private finance (Tapp and Kay, 2019) and reproduce racial injustices (Henricks and Seamster, 2017; Hickel, 2021) or in models of “blended finance” that leave decisions about the flow of capital to projects addressing ecological and social crises in the hands of private investors whose returns are underwritten by a “state-philanthropy nexus” (Christiansen, 2021; Cohen and Rosenman, 2020). The deepening entanglement of public and private finance also relegates important public policy decisions to the private sector, where they are insulated from popular scrutiny and democratic accountability (Braun, 2020; Lake, 2015).…”