Market, metrics, morals: The Social Impact Bond as an emerging social policy instrument

Berndt, Christian; Wirth, Manuel

doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.01.019

Cited by 78 publications

(82 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Through semistructured interviews with multiple SIB stakeholders, the author demonstrated that SIBs operate as an antimarket device: first, by eliminating local competition (for both the type of intervention and the type of service provider) and second, because the contractual provisions of the SIB for the protection of investors make the market‐like risk–return features of the SIB investment less explicit. Berndt and Wirth () placed SIBs at the confluence of philanthropy and the market. For the state, they highlighted a new role: that of being both absent and present and intervening from a distance through calculative devices.…”

Section: Analysis Of the Content Of The Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social impact bonds: The evolution of research and a review of the academic literature

Broccardo

Mazzuca

Frigotto

2019

Corp Soc Responsibility Env

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This study reviews all the academic contributions to research on social impact bonds (SIBs). It responds to the need for clarification across and within the various perspectives used in the literature. The goal was to assess the approaches used in extant studies and to offer directions for future studies. A bibliometric analysis was performed, and a framework was developed in which the contributions were positioned according to two criteria: (a) a distinction on the basis of research approaches and perspectives on SIBs and (b) an analysis of content according to a protocol that includes key questions corresponding with the most pressing issues in this area. K E Y W O R D S literature review, social impact bond, social impact finance 1 | INTRODUCTION The purpose of this study is to provide a systematic review of the academic literature on social impact bonds (SIBs). Since their introduction in the United Kingdom in 2010, SIBs have been receiving increasing attention from practitioners and scholars, as evidenced in the nuanced approaches and methods adopted for studying them as well as in the diverse research areas where SIBs have been addressed (Fraser, Tan, Lagarde, & Mays, 2018). To date, a review of SIBs focussed exclusively on academic papers is non-existent. Fraser et al.'s (2018) review included both academic (38 papers) and "grey" literature products (63 papers) from 2009 to 2015. They distinguished the "cautionary narrative" (mainly related to the academic literature) and two other narratives (mainly related to the grey literature) that assumed a pragmatic and ideological perspective of SIBs. At present, SIBs have broadened both in terms of adoption and research interest: This could allow academics to develop both theoretical and empirical analyses. Therefore, exclusive focus on academic contributions is timely because it is possible to reconstruct a scholarly assessment of SIB implementations, theoretical so-far developing arguments, and open issues. The review's strategy was twofold. First, a bibliometric analysis was conducted to explore (a) the evolution of SIBs in the literature; (b) the existence of central contributors and institutions devoted to work on SIBs; (c) disciplinary areas (research categories) that have shown interest in the discourse of SIBs; and (d) the visibility of contributions as measured through their positioning in ranked journals. Second, to develop a framework, academic contributions to SIBs were analysed and positioned according to two criteria: (a) a distinction based on research approaches to and perspectives on SIBs and (b) an analysis of content according to a protocol that includes key questions corresponding to SIBs' most pressing issues as individuated by the Government Outcomes Lab, a centre of academic research and practice for outcome-based contracting and SIBs at the University of Oxford. The current paper makes two contributions. First, it provides a critical analysis of academic contributions that point out directions and frameworks for extant research and future r...

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Section: Analysis Of the Content Of The Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social impact bonds: The evolution of research and a review of the academic literature

Broccardo

Mazzuca

Frigotto

2019

Corp Soc Responsibility Env

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“…SIBs involve different parties (Carè and Ferraro, 2019), are arranged around the logic of "payment-by-results" or "pay-for-success", and can be considered both a financial product and a template for social policy interventions, promising to save government expenditures and to increase the quality of social service provision with the help of private organizations and financial markets (Berndt and Wirth, 2018).…”

Section: Emerging Trends: Environmental Impact Investingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental Impact Investing: An Overview

Carè

Lisa

2019

ijafr

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In recent years, environmental and sustainability issues have experienced great interest. Addressing climate change requires the implementation of initiatives that require meaningful upfront capital investment and the development of alternative financing models for projects or initiatives with an environmental objective. In this sense, impact investments are currently used to fund projects and activities that tackle environmental problems. This work discusses new and emerging approaches towards sustainable development by providing a brief overview of the environmental impact investment movement and by focusing on an analysis of the first environmental impact bond (EIB).

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“…For governments this is attractive-it gets the operation of expensive social services off their books and creates at least the illusion that money is saved. As a manifestation of increasing private-sector involvement in social policy delivery impact, investing has a lot in common with phenomena such as corporate social responsibility, social enterprise, not-for-loss business, and corporate philanthropy, all to varying degrees regarded by insiders as "[sacrifying] economic profits in return for social impact" (Clyde and Karnani 2015, 20) and forming part of what has come to be known as social economy (see Amin 2009; for a detailed empirical analysis; see also Berndt and Wirth 2018).…”

Section: Eg_berndtmentioning

confidence: 99%

Struggling for the Moral Market: Economic Knowledge, Diverse Markets, and Market Borders

Berndt

Wirth

2018

Economic Geography

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Focusing on the recent emergence of behavioral and experimental economics and its implications for the design and implementation of social policies, we demonstrate that geographies of marketization are not confined to the narrow study of the models of neoclassical economics. We structure our argument around what we perceive as key dimensions of marketization and their variegated geographies: First, we argue for renewed attention to the naturalization of abstract market knowledge and its methodological separation from real markets in the wake of the behavioral and experimental turn. We then turn to really existing markets, conceptualizing them as articulations of a variety of economic and social rationalities struggling over an apparent "moral market." Third, we focus on the role of the nonhuman in marketization processes and discuss the work of market devices in making these market arrangements possible. In the fourth and final section we turn to the "human side" of marketization. Our argument is that market struggles connect with the formation of "quasi-subjects" that oscillate between attempts to reestablish autonomy and their dissolution in the disciplining webs of behavioral and experimental market devices. Throughout the text we illustrate our arguments on the so-called social impact bonds as a concrete example for the types of policy intervention informed by economic behaviorism and experimentalism.

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Market, metrics, morals: The Social Impact Bond as an emerging social policy instrument

Cited by 78 publications

References 42 publications

Social impact bonds: The evolution of research and a review of the academic literature

Social impact bonds: The evolution of research and a review of the academic literature

Environmental Impact Investing: An Overview

Struggling for the Moral Market: Economic Knowledge, Diverse Markets, and Market Borders

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