Running:
Impact investment promises to ‘do well by doing good’ – but we must ask: who defines the ‘good’ and who captures the ‘well’? Too often, these instruments allow capital to appear virtuous while preserving the very power imbalances that create the problems they claim to solve.
Having explored issues of extraction through aid, trade, philanthropy, illicit financial flows, and debt, this dialogue examines the “solutions” being offered: impact investment, blended finance, social impact bonds, and digital finance. The impact investment market has grown to over $1.164 trillion globally, with Social Impact Bonds promoted as solutions to public service delivery and ESG investing facing criticism as “greenwashing.” As traditional development finance fails, these mechanisms are increasingly promoted as transformation – but do they represent genuine change or sophisticated rebranding of extractive relationships?
This dialogue will examine how impact investment and “innovative finance” often function as what scholar Anke Schwittay calls “the moral economy of development” – allowing capital to appear virtuous while preserving fundamental power imbalances. The microfinance industry’s evolution from poverty alleviation to debt creation offers a cautionary tale of how good intentions become extractive when profit motives align with social problems.
📅 Date: October 28th, 2025
⏰ Time: 3PM UK / 4PM CET / 5PM SAST / 11AM ET / 8AM PST
🔗 Register for the zoom link
The Fundamental Question: When mechanisms profit from poverty, can they ever eliminate the conditions they depend on?
The Moral Economy of Development: How impact investment allows capital to appear virtuous without changing power relations, creating perverse incentives where poverty becomes “bankable” and accountability becomes theatre while avoiding systemic change.
Extractive Innovation vs. Genuine Transformation: How “innovative finance” maintains Northern control over development agendas through consulting firms, ratings agencies, and intermediaries that extract value while turning social services into tradeable assets.
The Perverse Incentives Problem: When risk-sharing becomes risk-shifting to the most vulnerable, and measurement frameworks obscure questions of power, ownership, and genuine community agency.
Community Finance Alternatives: Credit unions, cooperative banks, participatory budgeting, and community-controlled development funds that demonstrate how real community ownership differs from “community engagement” in impact investment.
Peter Lipman (Moderator)
Peter is the former founding chair of Transition Network and Common Cause Foundation and previously chaired the UK government’s Department for Energy and Climate Change’s Community Energy Contact Group. After careers as a teacher, co-operative worker, intellectual property lawyer, and external affairs director at Sustrans, he established Anthropocene Actions, a community interest company promoting fair, loving, and ecologically regenerative societies.
Frederic Hache
Director and Co-founder, Green Finance Observatory
After 12 years in investment banking, Frederic headed the policy analysis team at NGO Finance Watch for six years. He now directs the Green Finance Observatory, a think tank analysing market-based environmental solutions from carbon markets to biodiversity offsetting. He teaches sustainable finance at Sciences-Po Paris and brings unique insider-outsider perspective to critiquing financial greenwashing.
Patricia Miranda
Global Advocacy Director, Latin American Network for Economic and Social Justice (LATINDADD)
Patricia coordinates work on debt justice, financing, IFI reform and the “new financial architecture.” She is a regular civil society voice in UN FfD spaces and G-processes, linking debt sustainability to broader questions of fiscal space and equity. Her work demonstrates how innovative finance often reproduces colonial dynamics in new forms.