Issue translation and issue valorization: The role of professionals in the assetization of social and environmental impact

Assetization is a process through which social and environmental ‘goods’ are transformed into financial assets. Scholars of assetization have described how this process requires decontextualization of localized entities in order to make them abstract and globally tradable assets. While the spatial dimension of this process has been widely studied, less attention has been paid to how actors overcome the problem of linking these global and local scales. We address this problem by drawing on a comparative study of impact investing in Geneva and in the UK. We find that local actors, such as private asset managers, engage in what we call ‘issue translation’ as they seek to exploit structural holes in their proximate environment by translating abstract ideas of impact investing into concrete projects. This creates considerable heterogeneity in impact investing approaches that global ideational entrepreneurs draw upon to ‘valorize’ their ideas and frame impact investing as an emergent asset class. Together, we argue, these processes help explain variegation of and limits to processes of assetization.