Building the de-risking state: Power, policy, and Canada’s Social Finance Fund
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Authors
Cohen, Dan
Hodges, George
Otuomagie, Tinyan
Date
2024-08-29
Type
journal article
Language
Keyword
Alternative Title
Abstract
The Canadian social finance market received a significant boost in 2018 when the Federal Government announced a $755 million (CAD) Social Finance Fund (SFF). Despite rhetoric painting private finance as a funding solution for austerity-stricken social programmes, the SFF was explicitly designed to use public capital to support an existing private market where, in the words of the Canadian government, ‘supply and demand are not meeting each other’. While details remained sparse at first, in early 2023 it became clear that the SFF would hand off responsibility for the SFF to private financial actors by transferring hundreds of millions to three firms tasked with subsidising private investment in social finance.
In doing so, the Canadian government fit the wider trend of using public financial power to backstop private investment in areas deemed state priorities, referred to as the ‘de-risking state’. This article explores how a ‘de-risking consensus’ was built in a sector oriented towards social values rather than financial logics. We argue that studying how market institutions are constructed through acts of policy can highlight how power-laden policy networks and stylised best-practices are used to promote and justify de-risking market structures.
Description
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Finance and Space on 29 Aug 2024 available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/2833115X.2024.2375199
Citation
Cohen, D., Hodges, G., & Otuomagie, T. (2024). Building the de-risking state: Power, policy and Canada’s Social Finance Fund. Finance and Space, 1(1), 259–281. https://doi.org/10.1080/2833115X.2024.2375199
Publisher
Taylor & Francis