Finance interrupted: Social impact bonds, spatial politics, and the limits of financial innovation in the social sector
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
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.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it