Beyond Doing Good: ESG Metrics, Impact Finance, and the Reconfiguration of Public Education

Resumo

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) frameworks and impact-finance instruments are increasingly presented as pragmatic ways to mobilize private resources for public purposes. In education, these arrangements extend beyond private provision: they introduce targets, outcome payments, investment criteria, and reporting systems into the governance of public and publicly oriented programs. This article asks how ESG and impact-finance frameworks can reshape educational priorities even when the volume of private funding remains modest. A critical narrative review was conducted through purposive analysis of 14 scholarly and institutional documents published between 2003 and 2026. The corpus connects the genealogy of ESG, research on financialization and asset-manager capitalism, evidence on education impact bonds, and scholarship on privatization, performativity, and quantification. The synthesis develops the concept of metric-mediated privatization and proposes a three-mechanism model. Translation reduces plural educational purposes to indicators that can be compared and contracted. Selection privileges interventions, populations, and time horizons that can produce attributable and auditable results. Dependency gives funders, intermediaries, and evaluators influence over providers through conditional finance, standards, and reputational visibility. These mechanisms form a recursive cycle in which measured outcomes justify new standards and future allocation decisions. The review does not imply that measurement, partnerships, or private resources are intrinsically harmful. It shows, however, that technical accountability can silently redistribute authority unless public institutions retain control over goals, metrics, data, evaluation, and exit conditions. The article concludes with governance safeguards and an empirical research agenda for distinguishing useful supplementary finance from arrangements that subordinate educational judgment to investor-oriented definitions of value.