Duplicitous debtscapes: Unveiling financial inclusion in Cambodia

Keywords: debt, financialization, financial inclusion, microfinance, agrarian change, dispossession
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 67

Abstract

Social-impact investors have produced duplicitous debtscapes across the global south. In the name of financial inclusion, international financial institutions are actively extending financial services to rural households in order to alleviate poverty. The International Finance Corporation, the private-sector arm of the World Bank Group, is a major player in this effort. It has invested in microfinance institutions around the world through its Social Impact Bonds and Banking on Women business, among other mechanisms. When combined, the financial clients of the IFC provided nearly US$500 billion in micro, small, and medium enterprise loans in 2019 alone. In this presentation, I critically analyze how the IFC’s symbolic imagery and discursive framing of financial inclusion produces duplicitous debtscapes by drawing on the notion that representations of landscape veil exploitative capitalist social relations. This analysis is based on research about Cambodia, which hosts the largest microfinance industry in the world per capita. The IFC is a key shareholder in, and lender to, Cambodia’s biggest microfinance institutions, all of which have listed record profits as their clients struggle with mounting debts. I argue that the duplicitous debtscapes of the IFC and its Cambodian clients promote social-impact investing by obscuring the precarious social reproduction, land dispossession, and agrarian class formation wrought by microfinance debt in Cambodia. By studying debtscapes in terms of their material and symbolic production, this presentation contributes to scholarship about the financialization of poverty in development geography and allied fields.