Pressing environmental and social problems, like climate change or social inequality, have created an acute need for developing markets to help solve these grand challenges. However, markets push towards wealth creation and efficiency in ways that do not typically consider ecological or social goals. To use markets to address such goals, we need to better understand the conditions and processes that support the creation of alternative market outcomes. We investigate a new key trend in this context, namely the emergence of social impact assessment, referring to practices and measures for evaluating organizations' effect on the environment and the society. We collect and analyze a large qualitative data set of interviews and observations to produce new knowledge on the micro-processes of impact assessment. This will allow us to better understand the reshaping of markets in ways that acknowledge outcomes related to, not just the economy, but also the natural environment and the society.

2023

2027