The (non-)performance of the financial frontier: Building investment pipelines for the Sustainable Development Goals in Ghana

Abstract

Insufficient pipelines of ‘investment-ready’ projects are widely seen as a key impediment to unlocking private capital for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Countless development interventions are now devoted to forming the market intelligence and the intermediation supposedly needed to build and market investment pipelines for the SDGs. This contribution explores one such intervention: the Pipeline Builder Ghana, a partnership between the SDG Lab at United Nations Geneva and the Swiss-based impact finance advisor Ground-Up Project. Informed by document analysis and participant observation of SDG finance gatherings in Geneva and online, I trace practices of mapping, prospecting and brokering in the making of a pipeline of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) investments in Ghana. Approaching these practices as a financial frontier—a set of techniques to raise capital for the SDGs—I show that they do not necessarily perform in generating assets for investment. Yet, I argue that it is precisely through their ‘non-performance’ that these practices continue to proliferate in iterative ‘flickering’ forms, moving across and (re)making frontiers as sites always in need of intervention, all the while reproducing the racialised classificatory logic that inhibits finance capital to flow to these sites.