Social Impact Investing in Italy: a case of Weak Financialization?

The chapter tackles the question of social impact investing (SII) label creation in Italy, and specifically which actors seize and promote it and through which processes they succeed or fail in institutionalizing it. The analysis is based on the combination of the socio-technical perspective that allows identification of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ forms of financialization and the more institutionally and politically sensitive literature on the temporality of global policy circulations, articulating the analysis of fast and slow processes, from discursive adoption to actual implementation. The research shows the importance of the political context and conditions for the structuration of a proper financialized area of welfare service, through the sketching of three distinct phases in the penetration of SII in Italy. While a strong network of expertise emerged connecting the international and the national SII ecosystem and succeeded in the effort to push both discursive and financial dimensions of financialization (2014–19), this did not survive the political and financial instability of the Italian context, nor the, largely contradictory, pledge for the return of the state as the centre of welfare policies that has marked the years following the pandemic.