Introduction

Unlike the normative critique of unfettered financial capitalism after the 2008 financial crisis, practitioners and academics today suggest that finance can have a positive societal ‘impact’. This book examines impact bonds as a key example of this shift. It is the first book-length study to analyse how impact bonds configure heterogeneous elements into a calculative frame that is at once ethical and financial. While the existing international political economy literature often sees impact bonds as an extension of financial markets that absorbs ethical commitments, this book offers a different perspective. It argues that impact bonds enact a fact-based approach to poverty reduction by assembling social interventions, experimental methods (such as randomised controlled trials), performance management, and financial risk-taking into a programmatic form—reworking ethical reasoning rather than displacing it. Ethics thus reworked, however, evinces particular conceptual and political ambiguities that the book discusses in depth. The argument is developed through three case studies: two UK projects addressing homelessness and long-term health conditions and a project in India targeting the gender gap in education. The Introduction outlines these ideas and offers a few remarks on methodology and research design before setting out the structure of the book.