Introduction

The last three decades have seen a considerable global expansion of social finance providers, products, legal formats and intermediaries (OECD, 2015). Put simply, social finance involves investment and lending to community businesses and charities to achieve social, environmental and financial returns (Benedikter, 2011). A range of governments have established new community finance organisations, fiscal instruments (in the form of tax relief) and technical assistance programmes to enable and extend the social enterprise market. For critics, this is repositioning the community and voluntary sector around a neoliberal politics that privileges marketisation, state rollback and the disciplining of community groups to adopt more commercial modes of self-reliant working (Wheeler, 2017). This chapter argues that the expansion of social finance is critical to neoliberal rollout tactics but that it is also necessary and useful for community development approaches that respond to the needs of the excluded. Here, we are concerned with the relationship between community development and economic regeneration highlighting the importance of the ownership of assets and critically, finance, to support the social and solidarity economy (SSE).

Social economics and solidarity finance are fraught with definitional difficulties (Moore et al, 2014). In this chapter, we focus on the SSE, which is characterised by: community organisations that trade goods and services for profit but whose surpluses are used for social benefit; cooperative forms of ownership rather than shareholder interest; and governance rules that share a commitment to redistribution and ethical ends (Defourny and Nyssens, 2010; Utting et al, 2014). The chapter argues that social finance, as a support to the SSE, is a necessary component of local economic development, institution building and the development of skills and knowledge across the community and voluntary sectors. McFarlane (2011) draws on the work of Latour to show that neoliberalism is worked through a set of assembled relations that include institutions, resources, networks, actors (political and civic), decision-making routines, laws and knowledge producers. In turn, he argues that resistance is shaped by assembling countermoves, which to be effective, need to engage with the everyday realities of economic development and especially finance. In this spirit, this chapter advances social finance as a potential ‘countermovement’.