The politics of life

This chapter argues that impact bond-financed interventions are contingent upon a typical humanitarian trope of Fassin’s politics of life of the suffering other. While their results-oriented, technocratic approach purports to rely on evidence rather than the ‘warm glow effect’, they are ultimately an affective response to social ills that foreground victims. Focused on changing the circumstances and destinies of individuals who have fallen through the cracks of existing social and health services, they never address the underlying socio-economic causes of the issues they endeavour to tackle. In a second step, the chapter unpacks how factivist finance also forges productive elements, interrupting the effects of exclusionary constellations from within. Precisely by virtue of their technical appeal, impact bonds can lock in public funding, bypass dysfunctional policy arrangements, and implement targeted interventions at the local level—responding within the constraints of actors’ professional repertoires and perceived possibilities for action. In doing so, impact bonds simultaneously enact a relation of assistance and a relation of inequality. The chapter emphasises the importance of foregrounding these dynamics in international political economy analyses.