CDS Seminar Event - Affective Finance: Impact Bonds and the Mobilization of Capital for Development

Speaker: Sohini Kar

At the intersection of falling state-led development funding and the increasing financialization of development is the growing market of impact bonds for development. While impact bonds offer seemingly new forms of financing for development projects, from infrastructure development to microfinance lending and sustainable agriculture, they are not inherently new. This paper situates the emergence of impact bonds in the history of affective finance: from war bonds to diaspora bonds, issuers have often relied on the emotional attachments of investors. Drawing on interviews with impact bond issuers, document and archival analysis, this paper unpacks the challenge of balancing the affective and financial returns on impact bonds, and finally the challenges of relying on private finance for development.

Sohini Kar is a socio-cultural anthropologist focusing on economic anthropology of South Asia. Her work examines the impact of increasing financialization on poverty and development. Dr Kar has written about Indian microfinance, gender and finance, and on India’s financial inclusion policy and its relation to social welfare programmes. She is currently working on two projects: 1) financial activism and the ways in which both financial and non-financial actors engage finance as a space to enact social change; and 2) the impact of extreme heat on the lives and livelihoods of the urban poor in India.