Condividiamo il testo integrale del keynote tenuto da Mario Calderini, Full Professor al Politecnico di Milano, membro del direttivo SIA, in apertura della Social Outcome Conference 2025 che ha avuto luogo presso la Blavatnik School of Government dell’Università di Oxford, lo scorso 4 settembre.
“La neutralità politica dell’impact investing, che per lungo tempo ha rappresentato il suo punto di forza principale, si sta trasformando nella sua principale debolezza. Affrontare questa vulnerabilità richiede un dialogo profondo e tempestivo per esplorare il legame tra l’impact investing e la più ampia struttura politica nota come Economia Sociale. L’impact investing merita riconoscimento e legittimazione politica: sostengo che l’Economia Sociale sia il quadro politico in cui ciò può avvenire”, afferma il Prof. Calderini.
Impact Investing at a crossroads: designing the political architecture for a lasting social economy.
Mario Calderini, School of Management, Politecnico di Milano.
Full text of the keynote speech delivered at the opening session of the Social Outcome Conference 2025.
The Blavatnik School of Governance, University of Oxford.
Oxford, 4th September 2025
The political neutrality of impact investing, which has long been its major strength, is becoming its main flaw.
In an earlier draft of this speech, I used the word insipidity instead of neutrality. Reflecting on the source of this strong tone, I realised the speech was inspired by a genuine and unconditional passion for impact investing, coloured by frustration over unrealised potential, and yet fuelled by great expectations for the future. A future that is marked by a serious risk for impact investing: dying of pragmatism.
Regardless of the specific word choice or tone, addressing this vulnerability requires a profound and timely dialogue to explore the link between impact investing and the broader political structure known as the Social Economy. This is what I aim to prompt today, and I want to thank the Blavatnik School of Government and Go Lab for this invaluable opportunity.
The absence of a precise political character has ensured the persistence of impact investing across political cycles. In this country, social impact investment has stubbornly resurfaced in the British political agenda, from the Social Investment Task Force set up by Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown in 2000 to the launch of the G8 Task Force by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron thirteen years later. More recently, it took the stage once again, thanks to Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with the “Better Futures” initiative.
Impact investing’s enduring presence is a testament to the extraordinary robustness of its DNA, and it serves as the ultimate proof that a transformative political agenda cannot help but resort to Impact Investing. However, it also bitterly reminds us that after 25 years, impact investing still lingers in a limbo, a no-man’s land, between policy and administration, failing to achieve the scale necessary to become a consistent, structural alternative.
Impact Investing deserves political ennoblement and legitimisation. I argue that the Social Economy is the political framework in which it may happen. The best thing we can do for impact investing is to give the Social Economy structure, consistency, and the rank of a major political agenda.
The Social Economy is more a promise for the future than a clearly defined entity in the present. Efforts to define its ontological nature have so far focused more on listing its protagonists and values than on articulating its core transactional and organisational properties.
It is like trying to define what a car is by just enumerating the different brands without having a clue about how an engine actually works.
It remains a broad umbrella concept, inheriting features from related concepts such as social innovation, impact investing, social entrepreneurship, mutualism and cooperation.
Despite this conceptual fragility, its political importance continues to grow in many G20 countries, with the bitter exception of the European Commission and its wavering attitude towards the Social Economy and the United States, with the new spirit of the times exemplified by the cancellation of USAID multibillion-dollar programs.
In Europe, the recent shift towards competitiveness and defence, a rotten fruit of the Draghi report and a growing militaristic mindset, is concerning when it translates into the marginalisation of the political value of the social economy. The Commission’s new direction overlooks the proven resilience of the social economy, especially during crises and its role as a precondition for economic growth. More alarming is the false dichotomy being created between competitiveness and social cohesion, implying they are incompatible.
There are reasons to think that this is a matter of hysterical, temporary and local reaction to the multiple crises that the world is facing. In this respect, the United Kingdom is fortunate to be relatively immune thanks to the deep-rooted tradition in social entrepreneurship and impact investing.
The reason for the increasing political importance of the Social Economy is straightforward: the power of necessity. Despite progress in technology, economics, and societal structures, modern society still struggles with major problems such as refugee crises, the effects of climate change, poverty, the challenges of an ageing population, and inadequate education. Overall geopolitical instability, the withdrawal or even dismantling of welfare policies, and fiscal reforms are exacerbating the agony and distress of those affected by these crises. In this scenario, what role do we expect the Social Economy to play?
In a beautiful book titled “Social Economy Science”, co-edited, among others, by Giulio Pasi, a stronghold of the Social Economy within the European Commission, Gorgi Kirev, a leading scholar in social economy, suggests that the Social Economy has two fundamental roles: a safe pole of society and a source of renewal and change. Neither of these crucial roles has ever granted the Social Economy the status of an accepted economic paradigm. The first role, he argues, was often not viewed as a vital contribution to society, but rather as a secondary and imperfect means of addressing what others had broken in society. This made the social economy the “poor cousin” of the market and the state. Consequently, the Social Economy often gets less attention, hindering its institutional growth, financial backing, and overall standing compared to the market and state sectors.
When it comes to its second role, the source of change and renewal, the Social Economy is again denied economic paradigm dignity. The idea of a Social Economy could have gained traction amid the rise of sustainability discourse. As a matter of fact, the overwhelming rhetoric of ESGs and Sustainable Development Goals brought about the false reformist promise that a redesign of the inner features of capitalism, the emergence of a new notion of corporate purpose and new corporate values were more than enough to prompt a green and social transformation that prioritises principles of inclusion and equity.
Once again, the Social Economy was engulfed by far more powerful narratives and marginalised as a lateral element of the structured mainstream paradigm.
Finally, let us come to the core issue: how can Impact Investing contribute to the definition, the establishment, and the success of the Social Economy? I wish I could offer the reassuring perspective that improving our instruments and tools is more than enough, but I cannot stretch my confidence to this point.
Over the past fifteen years, we have witnessed waves of innovation in the field of finance for social good. From impact investing to social impact bonds, outcomes-based contracting, and blended finance, new instruments have emerged that are courageous in their ambitions and novel in their design. Yet despite these promising innovations, we still face a sobering reality: they have not yet coalesced into a coherent, robust structural alternative.
For too long, we have indulged in the hope that a scattered collection of tools and practices would build up in a different economy, whether social or impact-based. That belief now appears overly optimistic. It may be time to consider whether a more ideological, top-down approach would be more effective. In other words, a structured conception of the social economy is a necessary precursor and antecedent for impact instruments to attain true transformative power at a systemic level.
The compelling question, therefore, is not only what must be done to make impact investing as consolidated and successful as possible, but also how to establish it as an irreplaceable element of a new political vision for the economy.
Exactly sixteen years ago, a well-known prophecy was popularised by the Monitor Report and later reinterpreted by a small but vibrant community of impact investing scholars. In essence, the prophecy warned of two possible futures for the growing impact investing movement: either it would remain pure and exclusive—thus becoming small and ultimately irrelevant—or it would become massive and inclusive, but diluted in its principles, and therefore equally irrelevant.
This was hardly a reassuring prospect. Yet what is even more troubling is that both predictions appear to have come true simultaneously. Impact investing remains torn between two poles: a small group of radical, purist pioneers and a large contingent of generic, sustainability-oriented financial actors. Neither has managed to deliver systemic change at scale, for different reasons.
However, before labelling the entire effort a failure, we should acknowledge one area in which impact investing has been undeniably successful: contamination. Put differently, ESG and sustainable finance would likely have remained far less ambitious—particularly in terms of transformative potential and integrity—without impact investing serving as both an external benchmark and a source of catalytic influence.
Nevertheless, while this contamination has been relatively successful in the realm of private equity and private debt, the same cannot be said for public-private partnership models. When it comes to contaminating public policy, impact investing has made limited progress, especially if we define success by the adoption of its core features: explicit theories of change, consistent measurement practices, recognition of the complex, systemic, non-linear nature of social challenges, and, of course, intentionality and additionality.
Whether or not policymaking in the social realm has become consistently more effective thanks to the cautious diffusion of outcome-based contracts, social impact bonds, and similar instruments is a matter of ongoing debate. But the question should not be avoided. Regardless of the answer, we must ask ourselves one fundamental question: was there anything different that we could have done? Rather than providing a definitive answer, I propose two axes along which the response should be explored.
The first one relates to the intrinsic features of these instruments: their complexity; their efficiency compared to traditional grants; their ability to jointly address both supply-side characteristics (e.g., financial engineering) and demand-side aspects (e.g., the readiness and nature of service providers); and, critically, the quality and integrity of the measurement data used.
The second axis concerns the political nature of impact investing. It brings us back to the importance of embedding these instruments within a forward-looking, structured, and holistic conception of the Social Economy, ideally underpinned by an explicit theory of justice. Impact investing was born, survived, and even thrived outside any political “primordial broth” that might have nurtured it—demonstrating remarkable robustness in its DNA.
We must now build on that resilience by placing these instruments within a more politically fertile ecosystem—one in which outcome-based contracts and social impact bonds are no longer treated as isolated novelties and singularities, but as ordinary and strategic elements of a bold political vision. Such a vision should serve as an intentional antecedent, not merely an accidental emergent property of the use of these tools.
The future of impact investing is either political or it is not a future at all. The Social Economy is not simply a backdrop, but a foundational architecture, essential to enabling impact investing to fulfil its promise. But how is such foundational architecture generated? Are we equipped for such a generative journey?
Indy Johar has recently suggested that for decades, our collective imagination has leaned toward what he calls Platonic objects: fixed ideals or archetypes, e.g. “net zero by 2050,” or a housing, education or inclusion target. He concedes that they ensure clarity and coordination, but at the cost of fragility. They assume, he argues, a mouldable world, an image quite divergent from the increasingly turbulent, entangled, and nonlinear reality. His point is crucial: “when fixed forms collapse on contact with reality, we need to resort to fuzzy objects, i.e. futures imagined not as a single destination, but as a field of possibilities, a morphology to be navigated and adapted to over time”. This distinction, he says, “influences how we design contracts, how we allocate capital, how we hold accountability and legitimacy. A Platonic imagination produces linear plans and outcome contracts. A fuzzy imagination leans toward adaptive portfolios, real-time verification, and relational trust. Each comes with its own institutional logic, and the challenge is recognising when to hold onto clarity and when to embrace indeterminacy”.
Shifting to a fuzzy and non-deterministic, post-platonic morphology is the next challenge for impact investing, but also the enabling condition to cast impact investing in a more articulated and plausible policy space. In other words, to equip impact investing to become a generative force for a new political vision.
A considerable advancement in this direction could be represented by a resolute shift from transactional contracting to relational contracting, inducing the public administration to “forsake the simplicity of control for the complexity and power of influence and to resort to a shared definition of success, engraved in relationships”, as Eleonor Carter recently wrote.
Relational contracting poses immense and well-documented challenges to the contractual parties, ranging from opportunism to improper collusion, from unequal bargaining power to administrative continuity, specific competences, adverse procurement regulation and much more.
Although a relational contracting approach aligns closely with the requirements of the new fuzzy morphological space, it is unrealistic to conceive of a solution solely on technical grounds, due to the magnitude of the challenges above. No substantial contractual or relational innovation can occur outside a comprehensive and holistic reframing of a new political space within which impact investing and outcome contracting can find their sense and purpose.
The power of necessity and urgency pushes us in two directions: to rethink the economic infrastructures and reshape our instruments within a new paradigmatic space, the social economy. This is the way to ignite a new coevolutionary process, jointly instrumental and political, that will enable our instruments to flourish.
This is the way to avert the most concrete risk that impact investing is facing: to die of pragmatism.
Oxford, 4th September 2025