The opportunity for Foundations to engage with social investment: the case of the European Institute of Peace

• Autor(a) principal: Fouto, Susana Catarina Casaca
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/145758
• topic: Impact Investments; Domínio/Área Científica: Ciências Sociais: Economia e Gestão

This thesis sets out to analyse the strategic challenges that foundations in Europe face and the opportunity social investment presents to them as a new tool to achieve their missions. In particular, it explores how operating foundations such as the European Institute of Peace (EIP) can engage with impact investing through the creation of an internal investment fund. This analysis is particularly important because social investment is a growing sector with an immense potential to create impact and foundations can play a key role in its development. Social investment adds a third dimension, impact, to the traditional two-dimensional investment that balances risk and return. It has the potential to attract capital from diverse types of investors to solve complex societal challenges. Moreover, there is limited academic literature available about the experience of European foundations within the social investment sector. This thesis aims at closing that gap, by reviewing emerging literature and sharing examples of forerunning organizations in this field. This thesis studies how foundations have been engaging with social investment and contributing to its development in a variety of ways, including exploring it as a means to achieve their missions. More specifically, the analysis of this thesis is targeted towards a particular foundation – EIP, where I currently work and aim to contribute to its development with this thesis. This thesis is particularly important for EIP because it addresses the foundation’s challenges and ambitions and analyses how social investment could be an opportunity for the development of EIP and of conflict prevention in general. This thesis is relevant for a diverse audience, including European foundations interested in engaging with social investment, other operational organisations that, like EIP, have no endowment funds, and any kind of organisation working in the field of conflict prevention. This study proposes that operational foundations can engage with social investment and leverage their expertise through the creation of a social investment fund. It then details how such a fund can be developed with the EIP. However, it remains to be studied other solutions that could address EIP challenges and ambitions and other ways in which EIP could engage with social investment.