A CUNY seminar for those in the tri state area next month is backed up with some analysis on last week’s OECD report. Enjoy your Thursday…
Analysis: Major OECD Report On Social Impact Investing Comes As Global Initiatives Take Off
Vibeka Mair – Responsible Investor
The launch of a major report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) this week on social impact investment has coincided with a raft of activity in the nascent sector, with the Canadian and Malaysian governments looking at social impact bonds and New South Wales launching an office to promote social investment.
The OECD report, Social Impact Investment: Building the Evidence Base, was launched at a roundtable hosted by UK government in London. It was commissioned by the G8 Social Impact Investment Taskforce led by venture capital and social finance pioneer Sir Ronald Cohen. It found that there was a lack of evidence and consistency of approach around social impact investment in OECD countries, hampering its development.
It sets out seven key characteristics of social impact investment that include social target areas, measurability of social impact and return expectations.
Presentation by Robert Ogman, Doctoral Researcher at De Montfort University (U.K.)
March 10, 2015
6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
Sociology Lounge, Graduate Center, CUNY.
This presentation focuses on Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) as part of an emerging crisis governance strategy. Against many expectations, post-2008 developments did not follow a “postneoliberal” trajectory (Brand and Sekler 2009), but rather deepened modes of market governance through the policies of fiscal austerity (Peck 2012) and the associated insulation of public authority in a “post-democracy” (Jessop 2013; Crouch 2011). However, this has exacerbated the social crisis and further eroded political legitimacy. As a result, we’re witnessing the growth of policy focused on “social impact” and “public responsibility”, yet, not through the roll-back of markets, but through the development of a “social investment market”. This presentation focuses on a critical example of this, the “Social Impact Bond” (SIB), as a “new [initiative] of ‘public responsibility’ within market modes of governance” (Sprague 2010).