ABSTRACT
Under social entrepreneurship, innovative and profitable business models are seen as enabling entrepreneurs to tackle social problems and generate collective public benefits. As the financial driver of this process, impact investing facilitates the production of tangible goods and services for local communities that were previously marginalized in terms of infrastructure or social service provision, in areas such as rural energy, water and sanitation, education, healthcare and social housing. This chapter aims to elucidate the logics, institutional arrangements and rationales behind the transformation process, the key actors and institutions involved, and the corresponding geographical landscape produced. Village social welfare was regularly paid for and administered by prominent resident households. Both concepts, impact investing and social entrepreneurship, are American by origin and initially nurtured by the neo-liberal turn, unleashed by the Reagan administration. Founded in the Indian province of Bihar, the start-up company and so-called social enterprise Husk Power Systems have installed 84 mini-power plants since 2012.
