Unlocking Investment Potential in Agriculture: An ISM-Based Challenge Analysis

Impact funds have become common in the past few years due to the urgent need to adopt sustainable practices. The practice of sustainable financial investment techniques is urgently required to efficiently control the aftereffects of environmental deregulation, climate change, emissions, nuclear attacks, and human harm. All these situations create global concerns and are directed towards generating hunger and food crises. The emerging concept of impact funds is significant but is hindered by many challenges in its adoption phase. Still, no study has identified and listed the challenges in adopting impact funds. The present study has identified and ranked the challenges faced by the individual investors of impact funds in a hierarchical model by adopting the ISM approach. An in-depth literature review was conducted, and knowledgeable comments from the panel of 15 experts were taken to explore the contextual relations among the listed challenges. R software performed the ISM and MICMAC analyses of the 17 final obstacles. The impediments were ranked in a hierarchical model according to their challenge-creating intensity. The findings revealed that political and economic uncertainty, poor governance and regulatory framework, inflationary pressures, low scalability and sustainability, etc., are the foremost factors that create challenging situations for investors of impact funds. The study findings can be helpful for future researchers and scholars, policymakers, active and potential investors, and the members of regulatory bodies accordingly.