Elisabeth Fosseli Olsen

• Olsen, Elisabeth Fosseli (2026). Feeling good at the stock exchange: on impact as an affective valuation device. Journal of Cultural Economy. ISSN 1753-0350. doi: 10.1080/17530350.2026.2684635. Full text in Research Archive
• Olsen, Elisabeth Fosseli (2025). Rethinking financialisation of development: the case of impact investments in Tanzania. Journal of Cultural Economy. ISSN 1753-0350. p. 1–12. doi: 10.1080/17530350.2025.2589825. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  There is an ongoing concern about the financialisation of development, and scholars have shown how development interventions and policies are increasingly intertwined with this process, transforming development into finance. This article argues that expansion is only one possible outcome. Based on fieldwork in Tanzania, it analyses UN-operated accelerator-programmes and traces how the agenda to mobilise private capital is translated into practice through these programmes. It finds that finance arrives chiefly as ‘finance-as-format’ and an imaginary rather than as capital or investor governance, visible in choreography and language, but absent as actual investment and investors. Using ‘device plurality’ as an analytical lens, the article shows how financial tools are absorbed and reworked by state-backed development devices. Read through translation as betrayal, the outcome is not ‘colonisation’ by finance but conversion – even with elements of reversal – where attempts to mobilise private capital are redirected into grant-funded, development-as-usual implementation.

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