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Social impact investors claim to promote sustainable development by mobilizing private finance capital to solve pressing global challenges like poverty alleviation. In this paper, I interrogate this claim through an examination of microfinance in Cambodia, a major destination for impact investment. In the past decade, Cambodia has received nearly 10% of global investments from microfinance-specific funds. It now has the largest microfinance-debt per capita ratio of any country in the world. Based on qualitative research between 2021 and 2023, I argue that impact investment functions as an anti-politics of development that reinforces finance as a political technology of neoliberal governance. Over the past two decades, impact investors have poured capital into the country's microfinance industry to expand access to credit without acknowledging structural political-economic conditions that have produced rising over-indebtedness among microfinance borrowers. Instead, they have argued that the problems created by the microfinance industry are best resolved through a self-regulation model that uses a voluntary code of conduct based on global standards of responsible finance. Thus, impact investors have been integral in broader transformations that have extended financial logics, technologies and accumulation imperatives into people's daily lives. This paper contributes to economic geography and critical development studies by explaining how impact investment deepens neoliberal financialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing interest in exploring contemporary financialisation in terms of the geographies of debt. Many economic geographers have adopted a financial ecologies approach to explain these geographies. While this approach provides analytical benefits, it nonetheless analyses debt almost exclusively in terms of consumer finance, thereby overlooking the relations of production in which many indebted households engage. To address this issue, I develop the agrarian financial ecologies concept, which both directs analysis towards the diversity of credit–debt relations in rural economies, and highlights the relationship between land, labour and debt in the process of agricultural production. I apply this concept to study farm household debt in Cambodia, where indebtedness has become a widespread problem among farmers facing rapid economic transformation in the countryside. By focusing on land and labour, I demonstrate how diverse credit–debt relations within Cambodia's agrarian financial ecology have produced uneven socio‐spatial outcomes, namely debt‐driven land dispossession. This paper advances geographic theory about the dynamics of value production, circulation and appropriation within geographies of debt. It also extends the empirical remit of existing financial ecologies scholarship by attending to the credit–debt relations that characterise many agrarian livelihoods today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microfinance is a dominant strategy used to promote rural development around the world. Rather than directly track its impact on borrowers, however, microfinance institutions rely on indicators of financial performance adopted from commercial banking as proxies for positive social impact. Yet, as critical research has shown, the industry depends on coercive peer pressure, social shaming and various forms of gendered exploitation to achieve its high rates of loan repayment. This article maintains that there is a need to investigate how the microfinance industry's own indicators of impact contribute to the ways microfinance can harm borrowers. Based on qualitative research in Cambodia during 2021 and 2022, the article demonstrates how financial performance indicators, most notably portfolio quality, both hide and exacerbate the ways that borrowers juggle debt between formal and informal lenders. In making this argument, the article advances critical scholarship on microfinance by showing how microfinance repayment structures debt‐juggling practices in ways that put borrowers at greater risk of over‐indebtedness. As a result, the microfinance industry is able to claim that it successfully helps to alleviate poverty, even as it accumulates profits by appropriating wealth from poor and low‐income households across the global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial inclusion is a leading driver of household debt across the global South. Although critical geographers have analysed this debt through the lens of financialisation, few have examined it in terms of monetary politics. This is a salient issue, because poorer nations often have limited control over their monetary policy due to their dependence on foreign currencies, which can adversely affect the structure of their financial markets. Building on the concept of monetary dependency from scholarship on financial subordination, I analyse the monetary politics of debt in Cambodia. Drawing on elite interviews and ethnographic research, I argue that Cambodia's extreme monetary dependence on the US dollar has shaped monetary and fiscal policies that compel poorer households to take on private debt to pay for their basic needs. This paper advances critical geographies of debt and development by studying financial subordination and its impact on financial inclusion in the global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social impact investment for microfinance has become a dominant form of poverty regulation in the global south. These investments aim to alleviate poverty by extending financial services like credit to the world's poor, particularly smallholder farmers. The International Finance Corporation is a major player in this effort. It has channeled finance capital to microfinance institutions around the world through its Social Bond Program, among other mechanisms. In this paper, I analyze how the International Finance Corporation's impact investments depend on an ideological "way of seeing" poverty, informed by representations of agrarian landscapes, which mystifies the exploitative relations of microfinance debt. I term these representations duplicitous debtscapes. My analysis is based on research about Cambodia, where the International Finance Corporation is a key supporter of the country's biggest microfinance institutions. I argue that the duplicitous debtscapes of the International Finance Corporation and its Cambodian partners veil the conditions of production and social reproduction faced by indebted smallholder farmers, thereby legitimizing capital accumulation for impact investors. Yet these debtscapes are also contested. Thus, I further argue that the outcomes of debtscapes are shaped by the struggle over their representation. By studying impact investment in terms of the visual politics of debt, this paper contributes to scholarship about the financialization of poverty in development and financial geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Explores the role of household indebtedness in agrarian change in rural Cambodia. • Analyzes the financialization of social reproduction due in part to the microfinance industry. • Develops the concept of financial landscapes to explain debt as a social and ecological relation. In the context of neoliberal financialization, what is the role of debt in agrarian change? To address this question, I combine insights about debt from rural political ecology and development finance scholarship in order to analyze the relationship between changing agroecological practices and household indebtedness in a Cambodian rice- farming village. In the past two decades, Cambodians have borrowed from commercial microfinance institutions at the highest rate per capita of any country in the world. With fewer Cambodians farming, and agricultural production increasingly commodified, researchers have begun to study how the fast growth of Cambodia's microfinance industry contributes to these changes. By building upon the concept of financial landscapes, which highlights the diversity of social and material relations of debt in rural economies, I argue that agrarian change in Cambodia is entangled with rising household debts used to fund both agricultural production and social reproduction. I describe how non-monetary debt obligations underpinned labor-intensive rice agricultural practices in the 1980s and early 1990s, but have since been replaced by monetary debt used to fund household basic needs and commodified agricultural production. To make my argument, I draw upon 20 months of ethnographic research within a farming village in Kampot Province. This article contributes to rural political ecology and development finance scholarship by exploring debt in its diverse material and social forms at a time of deepening financialization, and how these debt relations in turn shape the economic and agroecological contours of contemporary agrarian change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically analyzes agrarian finance in terms of household credit and debt in the global south. I introduce interdisciplinary concepts about agrarian finance before reviewing how political ecologists and development geographers have studied this topic in relation to agricultural production, social reproduction, and farm mortgages and dispossession. To advance this research, I engage with financial geography scholarship about financial ecologies and variegated financial capitalism. I argue that agrarian finance is always embedded in the agricultural practices and interdependencies of rural life, but that such relations are increasingly shaped by global finance capital governed by institutions operating at multiple scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]