Dor around fifteen years, investment funds have offered wealthy savers “impact” investments, likely to both earn them money and allow them to have a positive impact on the world thanks to their wealth. Specialized platforms, such as Lita or Tudigo, have appeared more recently to democratize access to these investments.
Companies behind well-known applications, such as Yuka or Too Good to Go, have benefited, for example, from such funding. We can also cite associations like Emmaüs or Habitat & Humanisme, which have attracted investors thanks to solidarity property companies.
Today, the total amount of these impact investments is estimated at more than 1,000 billion dollars (917 billion euros) worldwide, including around 15 billion euros for France. Their growth is very rapid, but their market share is still struggling to exceed 1 or 2% of assets under management…
If this hybrid model, straddling classic investment and philanthropy, is indeed increasingly attractive, it arouses strong reluctance among certain people, who question the very possibility of articulating two logics which seem contradictory to them.
Hybrid model
Why are they so skeptical, or even downright hostile, to this new impact investment model? Our research allows us to understand the beliefs and values that underlie these oppositions (Arthur Gautier, Anne-Claire Pache and Filipe Santos, “ Making sense of hybrid practices: The role of individual adherence to institutional logics in impact investing “, Organization Studiesn° 44/9, 2023).
Some financial professionals are particularly resistant to these atypical investments. The iron rule in this universe is to invest with the priority of profit, with the only other element taken into account is the level of risk.
Changing these rules of the game for a hybrid model, which often offers a limited return on investment below the market, associated with numerous and poorly standardized social or environmental impact indicators, can be very destabilizing. Particularly for experienced investors, who have integrated for decades the maximization of “return on investment” in all their financial reasoning.
For them, the debate is not only about the definition of new relevant indicators: the very idea of combining, in the same gesture, financial logic and social logic appears transgressive to them, as if we were thus losing all compass.
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