IMPACT HAU pursues innovative and comparative anthropological study of impact investing. It focuses on the investors, implementers, and beneficiaries of sustainale finance, social investment, and venture philanthropy, with a particular focus on financial innovations such as bond-like mechanisms, to produce an empirically driven analysis of the multiple orders within contemporary capitalism.
Ethnographic case studies compiled by our researchers provide grounded, detailed account of the design and implementation of impact investing in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. These will support a critical appraisal theories of sustainability that underpin hopes for a socially inclusive green economy and generate proposals about effective and inclusive generators of impact.
Their main activities include: original research, ethnographic (i.e. long term participant observation, semi-structured interviews), focus groups, surveys, questionnaires, online ethnography, discourse analysis and workhops.
