Jacob Broom

This paper adopts a critical perspective that treats public participation in policy design not as a democratic ideal nor as a hollow ritual, but as a technology of governance: a set of tools, practices, and socio-technical arrangements through which governments structure reform, legitimise authority, and define policy possibilities. Drawing on governmentality and critical design studies, we develop the concept of ‘technologies of participation’ to describe how governments curate the terms of public engagement and set the discursive and material boundaries of reform. Using Australia’s ‘Review to Inform a Better and Fairer Education System’ as a case study, we show how participatory tools and design choices constrained public influence while building consensus around predetermined reforms. Through analysis of four technologies of participation – Terms of Reference, Expert Panel practices, a national survey, and the public release of the final report – we illustrate how participation functions to design consensus, manage dissent, and narrow spaces for contestation. The paper invites broader reflection on how the mechanics of public participation are inseparable from the politics of governance and demonstrates how the consultative spaces common in education reform are sites where power is carefully structured, contested, and continually negotiated.

The Albanese Labor Government proposed the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) as a centrepiece of its housing policy before the 2022 election. The HAFF funds social and affordable housing through the returns of an off-budget fund invested in global financial markets. This paper analyses the 2023 political debate around the HAFF. It uses the HAFF as a case study to examine the politics of financialised policymaking, investigating the political arguments made for financialised policies and the hegemony projects they represent. It is theoretically and methodologically framed by historical materialist policy analysis (HMPA), which calls for analysing policies in terms of the competing hegemony projects involved in their construction and contestation. I argue that Albanese Labor sees governing through financial markets as a central way to solve policy problems, and that this should give pause to celebrations of the return of social democracy in Australia after the 2025 election.

Gender lens investing (GLI) is booming. However, while intersecting feminism and social finance, it has received scant attention from political economy scholarship on either. We argue it requires specific attention because it is not reducible to ‘social finance with gender’ or the ‘business case’ for gender equality, though it contains elements of both. Through a three-part analysis, we examine its discourse, markets, and actors to locate GLI within debates around feminism, neoliberalism and social finance. First, we identify three competing discursive narratives: firm-oriented GLI, development GLI, and radical GLI. Second, we map the GLI market and find that it is dominated by public money and institutional investors. Third, we examine participation at a GLI conference and observe that it seems steered by the financial sector. We argue that GLI currently resembles other forms of social finance: it legitimises the decisionmaking power of finance capitalists while offering a progressive veneer. It has generated a renewed discursive architecture that justifies interventions very close to microfinance, while its dominant mode of empowerment is the empowering of women in business and finance. Recognising its radical advocates, we propose avenues for further research and some alternate trajectories that speak to these more transformative agendas.

This article explores Australian social impact bonds (SIBs) as a case study of the everyday life of state financialization and considers their implications for the relationship between financialization and neoliberalism. SIBs are experimental contractual arrangements for funding social programs based on their outcomes by selling the risk of failure to private finance. Since being adopted in the UK in 2010, they have spread to over 40 countries. SIBs require public officials and practitioners to engage in financial practices in the pursuit of delivering welfare programs. This article builds on literature on state financialization and the financialization of everyday life by centering these everyday practices. It argues that the everyday practices in SIBs reveal disharmonies between neoliberal rationality and financial rationality. This is demonstrated through a qualitative case study of Australian SIBs, based in document analysis and interviews. The case study highlights five modes of everyday financialization in SIBs: selecting programs to fund, negotiating value, using evidence, training nonprofit organizations in financial thinking, and embedding the logic of finance in payment-by-outcomes contracts. The article contributes to debates on the relationship between financialization and neoliberalism and highlights the value of exploring the everyday practices and governing rationalities involved in state financialization.

Social impact bonds (SIBs) are a social policy model for privately financing social programs on an outcomes basis. Like other social and development policy trends of the last decade, the construction of SIBs has been characterised by a global circulatory infrastructure that has seen them emerge in upwards of 30 countries. In this article, we interrogate the dynamics of the SIB ‘policy world’ that has enabled that mobility. We build a novel dialogue between the theoretical frameworks of ‘policy mobilities’ and ‘policy knowledge networks’. We argue that the lack of engagement with the internal dynamics of networks is a missed opportunity for political economy and policy mobilities approaches. As such, we employ a novel form of social network analysis, examining the ties of collaboration and advice between the authors of SIB policy texts and the organisations that they are embedded in. We find that SIB texts were authored by a disconnected community that rarely collaborated across organisational or jurisdictional borders. Knowledge production in the SIB world was uneven, as places and actors with ‘good knowledge’ were repeatedly engaged. We conclude that the financialisation of global social policy that SIBs impel is constructed through hierarchies of space and place.

Governments are increasingly intrigued by the possibility of harnessing the private ‘social investment’ market to finance the delivery of social services. One social investment initiative in particular – Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) – has spread extensively within the global North. This article investigates the transnational mobility of SIBs by exploring the adoption and implementation of SIBs in New Zealand. It considers SIBs as a case of ‘fast policy’, a concept that describes both the increasing rapidity of policymaking and the proliferation of ‘best practice’ policy models. Although the model was adopted relatively quickly in New Zealand, implementation spanned a number of years following various complications and setbacks, echoing experiences in other places. This article seeks to extend conceptions of policy mobility and fast policy by arguing for both fast and slow temporalities of policy movement, contending that while adoption of mobile policies tends to be rapid, implementation can follow a much more gradual pace as they mediate, and are mediated by, local political, institutional and ideological factors.

Social impact bonds (SIBs) are attracting an increasing amount of critical scholarly attention. As an outcomes-based mechanism for financing social services, SIBs financialize social policy through the logic of impact investing. Responding to calls for attention to the politics of SIBs’ development, and breaking with the literature’s focus on cases from the UK and USA, this article explores the emergence of SIBs in Australia. It employs the concept of “fast policy,” which theorizes why and how policies move across borders, and describes the contemporary conditions that enable them to do so. Using document analysis, the article explores the discursive devices and practices used to justify the “pulling in” of SIBs to states in Australia. It finds that key actors in the Australian social impact world justified SIBs’ adoption using their synergy with powerful, popular policy discourses and practices, rather than engaging in political debates about their desirability. The Australian experience illuminates the power of intermediaries and the investors they represent over the design and proliferation of SIBs, as well as the roles played by austerity politics, policy experimentalism, and fast policy infrastructures in producing a context in which SIBs could be made real.