Social Finance is a rapidly advancing area of practice, policy and research, with alot of unanswered questions. What does it amount to? What is it to be 'social' in finance? How do you value assets that offer a social as well as a financial return? This book provides a collection of authoritative essays on these and related topics. The essays embrace the different manifestations of social finance, collate existing research, set out the controversies, offer theoretical insights, and advances, and draw together the ideas of the leading thinkers in the field. Contributors to this volume are leading exponents and practitioners of social finance and leading academics from the main relevant disciplines and fields of study. This book is the first serious and comprehensive treatment of social finance and as such, will be of interest to academics with research and teaching interests in finance, social enterprise/entrepreneurship, public policy, business economics and international deveopement to name a few. If you want to understand and join in the academic and policy debates, or if you are working in one part of this field and want to understand how the landscape is being rapidly re-shaped, then this is an essential guidebook.

The Essentials of Social Finance provides an interesting, accessible overview of this fascinating ecosystem, blending insights from finance and social entrepreneurship. It highlights the key challenges facing social finance, while also showcasing its vast opportunities. Topics covered include microfinance, venture philanthropy, social impact bonds, crowdfunding, and impact measurement. Case studies are peppered throughout, and a balance of US, European, Asian, and Islamic perspectives are included. Each chapter contains learning objectives, discussion questions, and a list of key terms. There is also an appendix explaining key financial concepts for readers without a background in the subject, as well as downloadable PowerPoint slides to accompany each chapter. This will be a valuable text for students of finance, investment, social entrepreneurship, social innovation, and related areas. It will also be useful to researchers, professionals, and policy-makers interested in social finance.

Social finance and social investment are not challenging concepts to grasp. They use commercial-style investment tools to create a social as well as a financial return. The application, however, is not always as straightforward. This book begins in the wider field of social finance but focuses primarily on social investment as a tool. The reader is helped to understand this from different angles: introducing social investment, discussing social investment and taking a "deep-dive" into it to bring it to life. This unique book takes the reader on a journey from first principles to detailed practical application. This book examines the policy context and asks why social investment has only recently become so popular, when in reality this is a very old concept. This is linked to the agenda of making charities more "business-like", set against the changing face of investment, as charities can no longer rely on donations and grants as guaranteed income. The work they do is more important than ever and social investment, used with care, offers a new opportunity that is further explored in this text. Mark Salway, Paul Palmer, Peter Grant and Jim Clifford will help readers understand how a small amount of borrowing, or a different business model focused away from grants and donations, could be transformational for the non-profit sector.

For over 2,000 years, banks have served to facilitate the exchange of money and to provide a variety of economic and financial services. During the most recent financial collapse and subsequent recession, beginning in 2008, banks have been vilified as perpetrators of the crisis, the public distrust compounded by massive public bailouts. Nevertheless, another form of banking has also emerged, with a focus on promoting economic sustainability, investing in community, providing opportunity for the disadvantaged, and supporting social, environmental, and ethical agendas. Social Banking and Social Finance traces the emergence of the “bank with a conscience” and proposes a new approach to banking in the wake of the economic crisis. Featuring innovations and initiatives in banking from Europe, Canada, and the United States, Roland Benedikter presents an alternative to traditional banking practices that are focused exclusively on profit maximization. He argues that social banking is not about changing the system, but about improving some of its core features by putting into use the "triple bottom line" principle of profit-people-planet. Important lessons can be learned by the success of social banks that may be useful for the greater task of improving the global financial system and avoiding economic crises in the future.

How do market participants construct stable markets? Why do crises that seem inevitable after-the-fact routinely take market participants by surprise? What forces trigger financial panics, and why does uncertainty lead to market volatility? How do economic elites respond to financial distress, and why are some regulatory interventions more effective than others? Social Finance: Shadow Banking during the Global Financial Crisis answers these questions by presenting a new, economic conventions-based model of financial crises. This model emerges from a theoretical synthesis of several intellectual traditions, including Keynesian epistemology, Hyman Minsky’s asset market theory, economic sociology, and international relations theory. Social Finance uses this new paradigm to explain instability in the global shadow banking system during the global financial crisis. And it presents the results of interviews with some of the world’s leading investors – who saw over $2 trillion in annual order flows and managed over $160 billion in assets – to provide first-hand accounts of markets in crisis. Written in accessible prose, Social Finance will appeal to a broad audience of academics, policymakers, and practitioners interested in understanding the drivers of financial stability in the twenty-first century.

The current dynamics of world economy show remarkable changes in the socio-economics of credit provision and entrepreneurship. If the emergence of the sharing economy is fostering innovative models of collaborative agency, networking and venture business, economic actors are also looking for a more sustainable development, able to foster profitability as well as community welfare. This book investigates Islamic social finance as a paramount example of this economy under change, where the balance between economic efficiency and social impact is contributing to the transformation of the market from an exchange- to a community-oriented institution. The collected essays analyse the social dimension of entrepreneurship from an Islamic perspective, highlighting the extent to which the rationales of "sharing," distribution and cooperation, affect the conceptualization of the market in Islam as a place of "shared prosperity." Moving from the conceptual "roots" of this paradigm to its operative "branches," the contributing authors also connect the most recent trends in the financial market to Shari‘ah-based strategies for community welfare, hence exploring the applications of Islamic social finance from the sharing economy, FinTech and crowdfunding to microcredit, waqf, zakat, sukuk and green investments. An illuminating reference for researchers, practitioners and policy-makers dealing with the challenges of a global market where not only is diversity being perceived as a value to be fostered, but also as an important opportunity for a more inclusive economy for everybody.

Social financial reporting as an economic tool presents the firm as a socio-economic unit with empowered social capital to enable a sustainable economic solution, particularly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Islamic social finance (ISF) is a corporate social responsibility initiative in the form of humanitarian and socio-development programs by Islamic financial institutions and Shariah-compliant corporations. ISF is applied through various methods and tools that structure based on Islamic Sharia Law. For example, Islamic social finance tools would either be philanthropic, involving activities such as zakat (obligatory alms-giving), Sadaqah (voluntary alms-giving/charity), and waqf (endowment) or ta’awun (cooperation-based activities), which include Qardh al-hasan (benevolent loan) and kafala (guarantee). Thus, Islamic social finance instruments play a vital role in alleviating poverty and addressing socio-economic issues such as illiteracy, unemployment, malnutrition, and health issues. As such, integrated ISF reporting can empower sustainable economic development and lead to recovery. The Handbook of Research on Islamic Social Finance and Economic Recovery After a Global Health Crisis provides insights on the role of Islamic social finance in supporting and facilitating economic recovery in the post-COVID-19 era as well as reducing poverty and addressing the challenges of socio-economic problems such as education, unemployment, malnutrition, and health issues. This book is ideally intended for practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students who are interested in improving their understanding on the role of Islamic social finance theoretically and empirically in solving the issue of poverty and developing excellent funds management to achieve economic empowerment with better environmental sustainability.

Our world is experiencing increasingly complex social and environmental challenges. The prevailing business models and, to some extent, capitalism per se, are frequently blamed for these problems due to their neglect of social and environmental values in favour of financial returns. Within this context, social finance has attracted the attention of governments, organizations, entrepreneurs, and researchers as a means of mobilizing resources and innovation with the goal of establishing effective long-term solutions. This edited collection summarizes, discusses, and analyzes new innovative trends in social finance. It features contributions that aim to highlight emerging trends (products, tools, and processes) in social finance, present a series of case studies related to the development, deployment, and scaling of social finance innovations, offer an understanding of how non-economic externalities are being incorporated, managed, and assessed in recent innovations, reveal the disruptive potential of social finance innovations by analyzing how they are redefining mainstream finance, analyze the scales – of operation and impact – of different innovations, and explore the complex relationship between social finance and social innovation. Featuring contributions from both the research and practitioner community as well as policy actors, the book provides more than a snapshot of the current social finance field by specifically highlighting the major challenges and difficulties that require the urgent attention of policymakers and social entrepreneurs.

This book provides an authoritative and comprehensive overview of Waqf (endowment), addressing specific issues, models, solutions, structures and practices. As Islamic finance has gained in significance, so too has the institution of Waqf, working towards creating an enterprising and an entrepreneurial community across the globe, in order to meet the underlying objectives of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) by targeting the low-income group in particular. The book analyses the historical context of Waqf as well as its revival in the digital era. It addresses the laws and policies affecting the management of Waqf, such as Maqasid al-Shari’ah, law and policies, law and fiscal reform, regulations applied within Muslim countries, judicial procedures and dispute resolutions and covers the core issues concerning the formalities of Waqf, its management and corporate governance questions. The book includes a series of specialised chapters focusing on the products and services of Waqf, covering product innovation, product development, and then assesses the risk factors in Waqf and Waqf Takaful. Finally, it focuses on the challenges of Waqf and offers recommendations for the way forward. A timely and practical guide, comprising a literature review and future research directions, as well as a number of international case studies, this will be a key reference for academics, students, researchers, practitioners and policy makers.