Calculative Ethics : The Political Economy of Impact Finance (Ripe Series in Global Political Economy)

Andreu, Marco

Routledge（2026/01発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 236 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781032970806

Full Description

Calculative Ethics examines impact bonds as a form of calculative ethics. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, a growing number of practitioners, policymakers, and academics began rethinking the role of finance—promoting new vehicles that aim to align investment with ethical goals. In this instrument, private investors pre-finance social programmes are repaid by public or philanthropic actors if these programmes achieve predefined social outcomes. Impact bonds thus exemplify both an 'ethical turn' in investing and a deeper integration—or hardwiring—of finance into public and philanthropic programmes.

Based on three case studies—targeting homelessness and chronic illness in the UK, and gender disparities in education in India—the book shows how impact bonds merge financial tools, scientific methods (such as randomised controlled trials), and management techniques into programmatic responses to poverty-related issues. Rather than displacing ethics, as much of the critical literature claims, these vehicles are shown to rework ethics, giving rise to a distinct mode of reasoning. Yet this mode carries important conceptual and political ambiguities, which the book explores in depth. By figuring impact bonds as a fact-based approach to addressing societal issues, the book offers new insights into the politics of ethical investing and the financialisation of welfare and development arrangements. The book advances a nuanced understanding of power relationships, the logics that propel this type of financialisation, and the emerging social and development finance regime.

Calculative Ethics will appeal to students and scholars of international political economy working on financialisation, impact finance, and impact bonds in particular, as well as public policy, human geography, development studies, and economic sociology.

Contents

Introduction: Impact Bonds and the Financialisation of Social Programmes 1. The Social Turn of Finance and the Financialisation of Welfare 2. From Technologies of Power to an Experimental Investigation: A Governmentality Method 3. The Emergence of Impact Bonds to Finance Welfare and Development 4. Factivist Finance: A New Repertoire for Public Action 5. The Perpetuation of Testing 6. The Politics of Life Conclusion: The Ambiguous Politics of Factivist Finance