Calculative Ethics

Calculative Ethics investigates impact bonds as a form of calculative ethics; as a mechanism predicated on a fact-based approach to poverty reduction.

With âimpact bondsâ, private investors pre-finance the implementation of a social welfare or development project. Public institutions, on whose behalf the programmes are delivered, then compensate investors for their upfront investment based on empirical evidence of the projectsâ positive social outcomes. This book makes an original and provocative contribution to IPE accounts of ethical investing, and the financialisation of welfare and development. It provides a particular understanding of the prosaic and technocratic ways in which impact bonds rework the âplaceâ of ethics, and what ethics requires. It builds upon three case studies of impact bonds addressing homelessness and long-term health conditions in the UK, and the gender gap in educational attainment in India, respectively. The author argues that impact bonds employ a calculative mode of reasoning that is at once ethical, financial, managerial, and scientific, typifying this logic under the rubric of âfactivist financeâ, where financial returns are justified by providing quantitative 'proof' that the lives of vulnerable people have changed for the better. The author moves beyond an assumption of a binary between ethics and financial markets and offers a more situated critique that is based on the wider rationalities through which actors entangle ethical discourses with scientific methods, performance management, and concepts from venture capital and private equity investing. The book advances a nuanced understanding of power relationships, the logics that propel this type of financialisation, and the emerging social and development finance regime.

This book will appeal to scholars of International Relations and International Political Economy working on financialisation, impact finance, and impact bonds in particular, as well as scholars of Political Science, Anthropology, Economic Geography, and Economic Sociology.