This book provides a preliminary attempt to understand the impact investors’ preferences and characteristics. It offers an empirical insight of the main features characterizing social risk of Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) and explores the correlation existing between social risk and financial return. It assesses case studies of social impact investment architectures and their legal and operational limits. It also analyzes new trends in social impact measurement, focusing on the Spanish and Swedish experiences. The book concludes with a road map of priorities and policy strategy for social impact investments development.

Discover how to invest your capital to achieve a powerful, lasting impact on the world. The Global Handbook of Impact Investing: Solving Global Problems Via Smarter Capital Markets Towards A More Sustainable Society is an insightful guide to the growing world-wide movement of Impact Investing. Impact investors seek to realize lasting, beneficial improvements in society by allocating capital to sources of impactful and sustainable profit. This Handbook is a how-to guide for institutional investors, including family offices, foundations, endowments, governments, and international organizations, as well as academics, students, and everyday investors globally. The Handbook ́s wide-ranging contributions from around the world make a powerful case for positive impact and profit to fund substantive, lasting solutions that solve critical problems across the world. Edited by two experienced and distinguished professionals in the sustainable investing arena and authored by two dozen renowned experts from finance, academia, and multilateral organizations from around the world, the Global Handbook of Impact Investing educates, inspires, and spurs action towards more responsible investing across all asset classes, resulting in smarter capital markets, including how to: · Realize positive impact and profit · Integrate impact into investment decision-making and portfolio · Allocate impactful investments across all asset classes · Apply unique Impact Investing frameworks · Measure, evaluate and report on impact · Learn from case examples around the globe · Pursue Best Practices in Impact Investing and impact reporting While other resources may take a local or limited approach to the subject, this Handbook gathers global knowledge and results from public and private institutions spanning five continents. The authors also make a powerful case for the ability of Impact Investing to lead to substantive and lasting change that addresses critical problems across the world.

This book compiles and explains technical terms in sustainable finance in an easy-to-navigate A-Z format. The interdisciplinary nature of sustainable finance means that those researching and working in the field often have to turn to a variety of different sources to look up various non-financial terms. Recognizing this issue, Ibrahim Sancak and Elisa Aracil have curated a comprehensive list of the key terms most commonly used in the field. Each entry maps out an important concept or idea and illustrates how it relates more broadly across this growing discipline, such as the changes and innovations required by the financial sector to meet the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Overall, Essential Concepts of Sustainable Finance will enable readers to communicate more effectively about finance within the context of sustainability. With related terms and further reading included alongside the entries, this innovative and accessible volume will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners alike.

This book sheds light on current issues in sustainable finance through an in-depth analysis and discussion of relevant sustainable products and sustainable initiatives of several financial institutions. This edited collection critically presents and discusses several relevant theoretical issues, case studies of innovative financial products and sustainable institutions, as well as empirically investigates issues related to both financial and social performance. The book focuses on several innovative products across the sustainable finance ecosystem, including social impact bonds, crowdfunding and green bonds. Similarly, the book spotlights the sustainable investment strategies of institutions ranging from family foundations to asset managers.

This book examines funding platforms for impact investing known as social stock exchanges (SSE) and ways to approach impact investing at regulated traditional exchanges. The book analyses the antecedents and prerequisites for the successful implementation of SSEs. It presents the creation of SSEs as a necessary step towards a more democratic and popular impact investing market, and a way to align the asset search process for investors with capital access for entrepreneurs. It also analyses the installation of impact investing at traditional stock exchanges drawing from Green Bonds and Social Bonds. The book showcases successful financial structuring, integrating impact into existing financial products. It discusses standalone impact solutions, the status quo of impact investing, social entrepreneurship and the pros and cons of platforms versus the use of traditional stock exchanges for impact investing. It highlights aspects of adjusted portfolio and product structuring, innovation in the context of listing criteria and makes proposals for impact stock listings at platforms and traditional stock exchanges.

To be a storyteller is an incredible position from which to influence hearts and minds, and each one of us has the capacity to utilise storytelling for a sustainable future. This book offers unique and powerful insights into how stories and storytelling can be utilised within higher education to support sustainability literacy. Stories can shape our perspective of the world around us and how we interact with it, and this is where storytelling becomes a useful tool for facilitating understanding of sustainability concepts which tend to be complex and multifaceted. The craft of storytelling is as old as time and has influenced human experience throughout the ages. The conscious use of storytelling in higher education is likewise not new, although less prevalent in certain academic disciplines; what this book offers is the opportunity to delve into the concept of storytelling as an educational tool regardless of and beyond the boundaries of subject area. Written by academics and storytellers, the book is based on the authors’ own experiences of using stories within teaching, from a story of “the Ecology of Law” to the exploration of sustainability in accounting and finance via contemporary cinema. Practical advice in each chapter ensures that ideas may be put into practice with ease. In addition to examples from the classroom, the book also explores wider uses of storytelling for communication and sense-making and ways of assessing student storytelling work. It also offers fascinating research insights, for example in addressing the question of whether positive utopian stories relating to climate change will have a stronger impact on changing the behaviour of readers than will dystopian stories. Everyone working as an educator should fi nd some inspiration here for their own practice; on using storytelling and stories to co-design positive futures together with our students.

Humanitarian crises have become more frequent, complex and protracted. If current trends continue, it is estimated that by 2030, humanitarian assistance costs could increase to $50 billion per year. By then, two-thirds of the world’s poor are at risk of living in conflict-affected countries. To bridge the gap, humanitarian organizations are increasingly utilizing innovative financing tools such as impact bonds, faith-based finance and other innovative financial products and services to mobilize greater funding to address humanitarian needs. This book is among the first to assess a set of innovative financing mechanisms that have been transforming the humanitarian sector and explores their key opportunities, challenges and future prospects. This book will be of interest to academics, practitioners, humanitarian organizations and policy makers involved in humanitarian financing and to the humanitarian sector in general.

Social enterprises are businesses with primarily social or environmental purposes designed to create value for the clients of the business, and to reinvest surpluses into the business or community. They serve as social innovation laboratories, and frequently collaborate with governments or other nonprofits to serve their communities and clientele. The chapters in this book discuss the development and flourishing of social enterprises in eight countries around the world, including China, India, Great Britain, the United States and the Czech Republic. Specifically, the authors cover how social enterprises are managed, how they operate with their national and local governments, and the contributions they are making to service delivery and social innovation. Different theoretical lenses are used to assess the roles that social enterprises play in the different countries, and how they relate both to the nonprofit world and their governments. This book will appeal to all students, researchers and scholars who focus on the third sector, social economy, public policy and social enterprise, as well as to intellectual social enterprise leaders and practitioners. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Public Management Review.

Convergence science is the process whereby innovation comes from the cross pollination of diverse disciplines, industries and cultures, carrying ideas and approaches across boundaries. This book is a blueprint for how this could and should occur in mental health in order to solve the complex, multi-system problems that the field faces.

Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility: Sustainable Value Creation (Sixth Edition) redefines corporate social responsibility (CSR) as being central to the value-creating purpose of the firm. Based on a theory of empowered stakeholders, this bestselling text argues that the responsibility of a corporation is to create value, broadly defined. The primary challenge for managers today is to balance the competing interests of the firm’s stakeholders’ understanding that what they expect today may not be what they will expect tomorrow. This tension is what makes CSR so complex and demanding, but it is also what makes CSR integral to the firm’s strategy and day-to-day operations. In this new Sixth Edition, author David Chandler explores issues around COVID-19, the BLM movement, the supply chain crunch, and the "great resignation."