Social Bonds as an Innovative Financial Instrument for ESG Initiatives: The Case of Toronto

Social bond is an innovative financial instrument designed to raise funds to invest in infrastructures that address a specific social issue or seek to achieve viable social outcomes. This emerging financial instrument has a complementary role in providing financial resources for Environmental Social Governance initiatives that support social sustainability programmes. This chapter begins with a literature review on social bond highlighting its rationale and approaches from a global perspective on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the critique of which suggests the possibility of a more holistic framework, taking social and human developments into consideration, for social and complementary environmental sustainability in relation to social bond financing. This case study unveils the existing social and green debenture frameworks and some of the funded programmes in the City of Toronto. It considers how its social bonds issued have complemented the Environmental Social Governance strategy and/or fallen short for one of the largest metropolitan areas in Canada. It articulates the uncultivated potentials of leveraging social bonds for the development of human capital in support of salient social outcomes while attaining the expectation of the capital market.