Jacob Broom

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.

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 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.

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.