Social Impact Bond assetization struggles: A comparative case study of the United Kingdom and Germany

Abstract

Assetization has become a promising analytical lens in the field of economic sociology and related disciplines. It highlights the creation of reliable income streams for investors instead of competition, tradability and the short-term nature often highlighted in the analysis of (financial) marketization. The Social Impact Bond (SIB) is a noteworthy phenomenon to explore the potential development of assetization. The SIB developed from an original idea, wherein the risk for social programme delivery was supposed to transfer from the state to private investors, to a scheme, where the state increasingly de-risks private investors, particularly in the United Kingdom. We present a comparative case study of two SIBs from a SIB-hesitant institutional environment (Germany) and the United Kingdom, a country that supports SIBs through government investment funds. In both cases, we find assetization not being a straightforward process, which is why we focus on assetization struggles. We find assetization struggles along two dimensions: first, we observe actors struggling in relation to the investor return element of the SIB, second, we observe actors struggling in relation to the question of how, and to what extent the SIB framework should change the organization and practices of social work on the ground.

Keywords:

• financialization
• marketization
• social work
• public asset
• public sector reform

1. Introduction

The Social Impact Bond (SIB) is a relatively recent innovative financial instrument that ‘burst onto the public financing scene with astonishing rapidity and near simultaneity in governments around the world’ over the past decade (Cooper et al., 2016, p. 63). Its promise is to funnel private investor capital into the social sector and to finance interventions addressing ‘wicked problems’ such as unemployed youth, drug abuse, criminal recidivism and homelessness. It started off with a pilot project on criminal recidivism in HMP Peterborough in the United Kingdom in 2010. Since then, over 280 SIBs have been implemented worldwide, more than a third of them in the United Kingdom. Its initial promise was to derive financial gains for the public sector through effective and innovative social interventions identified through rigorous measurement of social impact linked to public sector savings (Fraser et al., 2018).

SIBs, in many ways, belong to the toolbox of New Public Management, applying payment-by-result and target-based performance management approaches popularized since the 1980s. The decisive feature of the SIB is to bring in private investor capital into Public-Private-Partnership-like social sector arrangements and transfer programme failure risk from the public sector to the private sector (Warner, 2013). SIBs have been designed as an instrument to catalyse the market for social impact investment and foster the involvement of social impact investors (Barman, 2015, 2020; Bourgeron, 2020; Hellman, 2020; Stolz & Lai, 2020). The SIB therefore has been understood as an indication of the broader development of marketization (Cooper et al., 2016), and of financialization (Mitropoulos & Bryan, 2013; Lake, 2015; Chiapello, 2015) of social politics. In recent years, Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa (2020) have proposed the analytical lens of assetization to study current capitalist dynamics. The asset, they argue, is a capitalist form that secures regular revenue streams for investors. Compared to the related lenses of commodification or marketization, they argue, assetization highlights that trade and competition are not necessarily the decisive feature in current capitalism, instead highlighting contractual socio-technical arrangements that allow regular and reliable revenue streams to be maintained over time.

The SIB is a promising phenomenon to be studied through this analytical lens. The SIB has been analysed as an ‘anti-market device’ (Neyland, 2018) that prevents competition and transparency, and allows regular revenue streams through the contractual and compartmentalized design of ‘social impacts’. To do so, the involved parties engage in significant ‘valuation struggles’ (Williams, 2020a, p. 297), which often lead to situations where the SIB contractual designs fail, and the protagonists find alternative ways to fund social programmes (Fraser et al., 2021). Some SIBs provide high investor returns, others do not (Fraser et al., 2022). Our analysis starts from these observations about the uncertain character of the SIB in practice, which sometimes appears to deliver fully fledged financialization and sometimes does not (Tse & Warner, 2020b).

In this paper, we explore the uncertainty, or ambivalence of the SIB instrument through the idea of assetization struggles. We build on Williams (2020a) focus upon valuation struggles, but highlight that the struggles we observe, are around the creation of an asset condition in the social sector. We show how important struggles with respect to the creation and implementation of SIBs unfold over questions about how far assetization should be encouraged or resisted by the actors involved in establishing and managing SIB-financed social work programmes. We observe this alongside two dimensions: assetization struggles over the question of limiting or allowing high and easy investor returns, and assetization struggles shown through the level of ‘decoupling’ (Meyer & Rowan, 1977) between social work and a monetary social impact category.

To do so, we compare two qualitative SIB-financed social work cases from the United Kingdom and Germany. The United Kingdom is a country that supports SIBs at the national government level through a well-developed outcome funds infrastructure (Huckfield, 2020), and well-established ‘rate card’ approach to the calculation of outcomes payments. The United Kingdom continues to have the highest number of past or current SIB-financed projects (Outes et al., 2023). In contrast, Germany represents a SIB-hesitant environment with little or no national government support for SIBs. SIB contracts in Germany are negotiated on a hyper-local level, with local government actors only interacting directly with investors and local social service provider organizations.

Pertinently however, we see assetization struggles in both local case study sites along two analytical dimensions: first, struggles around building and preventing high returns for investors around the new asset category of social impact and second, struggles on the level of social work and service delivery, from where the new asset category social impact is derived. In both sites, assetization is prevented in that sustainable high returns for investors through SIB activity is not achieved. We also demonstrate how the protagonists in our comparative case study sites struggle with attempts to assetize the social workers’ case management. We find outright resistance to this in our German case, whereas in our UK case, assetization does impact aspects of social work practice.

We conclude, drawing on detailed case study data from these local SIB projects that the decisive feature of the SIB might not necessarily be or become a story of high private investor returns (even though they can be realized in other cases both in the United Kingdom and beyond), but assetization becoming a mechanism in public sector procurement, which does not necessarily require private investors. This, of course, is a somewhat tentative conclusion, but we observe moves towards the SIB instrument becoming more anti-high profit, and pro-social impact, of which our case studies are indicative. Assetization is thus not necessarily a story of privatization and private returns, only, but may increasingly become a public sector and a public asset story (Williams, 2020a, p. 289). State (not private) investments play the decisive role in the processes of assetization we observe.

2. SIBs and assetization

The SIB is an instrument that has attracted a lot of interest in the social sciences in recent years (Chiapello & Knoll, 2020a, p. 14). It is a particularly intriguing phenomenon to those scholars in the fields of marketization (Joy & Shields, 2013), securitization (Cooper et al., 2016), financialization (Lake, 2015; Chiapello, 2015) and more recently assetization (Williams, 2020a) of social policy. The SIB initially promised to funnel private sector capital into the underfinanced social sector – the promise was framed by the catchy slogan ‘filling the capital gap’ (Nicholls, 2014) – and has evolved into a public sector funding architecture, where the state has stepped in, in order to de-risk private investor capital and secured their financial gains to a significant extent in the United Kingdom (Golka, 2023).

The most discussed and debated SIB-financed project remains the first one, famously launched by the David Cameron government at HPM Peterborough in 2010. The Peterborough SIB was a recidivist programme providing pre- and post-release mentoring to help young male adult and short-sentenced prison leavers break the reoffending cycle. The aim of this project was to provide evidence for ‘social impact’, which is considered to deliver more rigorous evidence than measuring ‘social outcome’ or ‘social output’. The state-of-the-art method to provide evidence for impact at that time was the randomized control trial. This was established with the aim to identify public sector savings that can be shared with investors, who should bear the risk of the failure of an investment. To this end, three defined cohorts of 1,000 ex-prisoners were compared to a control group sample of ex-prisoners resembled from the Police National Computer database (Nicholls & Tompkinson, 2015, p. 348). The Peterborough impact bond would trigger return on investment ‘if the SIB reduced reoffending by a threshold of 10 per cent for any of the three cohorts of 1,000 ex-prisoners – or 7,5% across the entire 3,000’ was achieved (Nicholls & Tompkinson, 2015, p. 347). This set-up led to a constellation, where investor consortia received their return on investment after the project’s termination in case of success, only, not during the runtime of the project.

This situation induced a debate on the necessity of ‘front-loading capital’, which was subsequently realized through the UK outcome funds infrastructure in the subsequent years. Leslie Huckfield (2020, pp. 181–182) counts 17 UK public sector funds for social investment set-up between the years 2004 and 2016, applicable for the design of SIBs. With these funds, the ambition to measure evidence for impact was downgraded towards much less rigorous approaches to the measurement of social project results. The ‘rate card’ is a tool to administer national outcomes funds (Economy et al., 2023, p. 423). Table 1, representing the rate card from the UK Youth Engagement Fund, highlights the calculative processes through which returns on investments throughout the run-time of a SIB project can be realized as soon as certain targets are met (Hevenstone et al., 2023a). In the case of improved attendance at school, for example, investors gain £1,400 paid from a national public sector outcomes fund. This leads to a constellation, where investor ‘payments are made based on pre/post comparisons or simple ex-post verification, providing far less certainty that the public is paying for outcomes that could be attributed to the SIB-funded intervention’ (Economy et al., 2023, p. 423).

Table 1. Youth engagement fund rate card

Outcome	Price
Participants aged 14 and 15 years
Improved attitude to school or education	£400
Improved attendance at school	£1,400
Improved behaviour at school	£1,100
QCF accredited entry level qualifications (below GCSE)	£1,000
Participants aged 16+
Improved attitude to school or education^a	£400
QCF accredited entry level qualifications (below GCSE) with a literacy and numeracy focus	£1,000
First QCF level 1 qualification	£1,500
First QCF level 2 qualification	£3,900
First QCF level 3 training/vocational qualification	£2,700
Entry into first employment (16 h per week or more) with a training element (e.g. an apprenticeship, or work-based learning)	£3,400
Entry into sustained employment (26 weeks)	£1,900

Note: At a later point this outcome was removed.

Source: Ronicle and Smith (2020, p. 16).

It is fair to say that without this government-led financial infrastructure the UK SIB market would not be as extensive as it is. In the United Kingdom, the SIB model, in order to scale-up at the national level, requires state-orchestrated investment funds, akin to the feed-in-tariffs that produce state-induced ‘predictable income streams’ in the energy sector (Nadai & Cointe, 2020, p. 152).

Birch and Muniesa (2020), in this respect, highlight the importance of assetization as a public sector phenomenon, which the SIB very much resembles. They underline the need to study the ‘extension of the asset condition (taxpayer as an investor, public budget as investment fund, public holdings as capital assets, public services as return)’ and the public sector being ‘indeed a central part of assetization studies’ (Birch & Muniesa, 2020, p. 20). The United Kingdom dimension of this is emphasized, when compared to Germany, where SIB proponents mourn the ‘lack of adequate [public sector] “pipelines” for investments’ (Glänzel & Scheuerle, 2016, p. 1645). Williams (2020a) also concludes

what may be most significant about SIBs moving forward is the creation not of a private asset but rather a new type of public asset, one that is likely to have critical implications for the relationships between the state and the social sector. (p. 289)

Generally, though, assetization provides a helpful framework through which to understand the SIB phenomenon (Williams, 2020a). The asset, according to Birch and Muniesa (2020), provides a capitalist form for which being sold and bought (financial market liquidity) is not the most important feature. Rather, it is the capacity of generating regular and reliable revenue streams. ‘Assets can be bought and sold, yes. But the point is to get a durable rent from them, not to sell them in the market today’ (Birch & Muniesa, 2020, p. 2). Philipp Golka (2021) clarifies: ‘While financial markets require assets (to be traded as commodities), assets – and hence assetization – do not necessarily need financial markets’ (p. 89). The focus of the assetization lens lies with the construction of reliable contractual rentier designs, such as leasing or rent, which allows regular and compartmentalized revenue streams to be realized, not necessarily the short-termism that is associated with the shareholder value culture. Eve Chiapello (2023) argues that the decisive element here is the socio-technical creation of value extraction before the actual production of this value takes place. This is achieved through ‘intangibilizing’ of tangible assets (Chiapello & Engels, 2021) and the calculation of future value, which allows these revenue streams to be realized and maintained. It is thus the ‘financialized valuation of an asset’ (Chiapello, 2023, p. 3) that is key. The assetization lens helps to focus on the detailed and complex socio-technical creation processes within broader financialization trends.

Financialized assetization thus provides a more adequate lens to study SIBs than marketization or commodification. Even though the SIB has been discussed as a process of ‘marketization’ in the beginning (Joy & Shields, 2013; Ogman, 2020), there are important arguments as to why marketization may not be the adequate lens to understand it. This has to do with the fact that a secondary market for traded social impact units is not, and will probably not be realized even though it has been envisaged in the idea of a ‘bond’ (Dowling, 2017, p. 304). Also, on the level of social sector service organization, the SIB does not provide elements of free choice for customers, such as with voucher-schemes, where the customers can, for example, select the social service they like best (Tse & Warner, 2020a). Neyland (2018) notably argues that the SIB should be understood as an ‘anti-market device’, since they tend to circumvent public tender competition for social service providers and generate significant ‘information asymmetry’. ‘The market’ (carrying the ideas of fair competition, and fair information), is rather a narrative and justificatory element in the SIB context, not so much an empirical reality. Instead, the outcome is a maintained revenue stream for investors through the compartmentalization and prediction of public sector ‘savings’ or ‘added value’ from which a return-on-investment can be deduced.

Assetization is not only about building a reliable investor proposition, but also about transforming social work, so an asset category can be established and returns calculated from the practice of social work. Christine Cooper, Cameron Graham and Darlene Himick (2016) in their London homelessness SIB case study argue that the homeless people participating in the social intervention were turned into ‘830 new individual “enterprising units” and/or investment opportunities. The 830 could be conceived as an investment portfolio, with each individual carrying their own level of risk’ (Cooper et al., 2016, p. 73). They suggest that ‘accounting played the pivotal role of being the method to determine the profitability of the project (crucial to attracting investors) as it incorporated the life circumstances of the homeless into its methodologies’ (Cooper et al., 2016, p. 73). Manuel Wirth (2020), in his case identified an intriguing constellation, where the clients in a SIB project knew their monetary worth, and started claiming it. Here, the participants (the ‘beneficiaries’) received a £100 gift card for participating in an education programme (Wirth, 2020, p. 189, 200), since it is often difficult to motivate them to do so in the everyday practice of social work. Participating in an education programme is quite valuable in the rate card scheme, and social workers learned what to do in order to reach this target incentivizing their clients to help them achieve their targets.

Other comparative studies of SIBs show that not all projects planned as SIBs end up as SIBs (Fraser et al., 2021), and that within the SIB landscape there is a great plurality of contract design (Chiapello & Knoll, 2020b). Some do, and others do not end up as fully financialized with high and easy investor profits based on flawed targets (Tse & Warner, 2020b; Hevenstone et al., 2023a, 2023b). Depending on the investor involved, some are very focused on the quality (and incommensurability) of the social service and others very bureaucratic and rigid in documentation and control (Carter, 2021). It seems from this literature that one clear-cut diagnosis of a bigger trend such as assetization as a sure-fire process may be contested. In reality, processes of assetization through SIB technologies may fail or may be subverted, notwithstanding the goal of high investor returns as the UK outcome funds infrastructure allows to be realized (Economy et al., 2023). This is why we think it is important to focus on assetization struggles, so as to emphasize the actors’ local negotiations, difficulties and sometimes resistance to financialized assetization as a process.

The assetization framework focusses upon the complex socio-technic processes of ‘institutional work’ (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2010) in building the asset condition. A whole ‘ecosystem of diverse financial, technoscientific, political, and social actors’ (Birch & Muniesa, 2020, p. 7) is required to foster assetization. Diverse actors must collaborate towards ‘the definition of what an asset’s boundaries are, the measurement of its quantity and quality, and a valuation of its monetary worth – all of which requires an enormous amount of work by technical experts, economists, valuation analysts, policy-makers, and others’ (Birch & Muniesa, 2020, p. 15). In this vein, the SIB may require the establishment of a whole new industry of professionals working in intermediary organizations, as lawyers, evaluators, public servants and social service providers relevant for contractual SIB design (Williams, 2020b). In this paper, we offer insights into the complexities of building the asset condition in the social sector based on a comparative case study on assetization struggles at two SIB case study sites: one in the United Kingdom and one in Germany.

3. Methods

Qualitative case studies are an appropriate method for exploring issues related to policy implementation, exploring ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions about phenomena through detailed contextualized accounts of cases (Yin, 2003). Our investigation is based on 23 semi-structured qualitative interviews across two case study sites – one in a northern English city, and one in a southern German city. Most interviews lasted an hour and were conducted face to face but there were a small number of telephone interviews when this was not possible. Most interviews were conducted in English, though some interviews were conducted in German depending on the preference of each informant. In addition to the interview data, we also draw on documentary data from the sites to learn more about the interventions and wider aspects of each project. The interviews took place between 2019 and 2022. The data were analysed using a combined inductive and deductive approach (Langley, 1999). We compare cases from the United Kingdom and Germany following the logic of critical case sampling (Patton, 2001). As noted already, in national terms the United Kingdom is more receptive to the SIB idea than Germany, with diverse national government social outcomes funding schemes in place. Details of informants across both sites are given in Table 2.

Table 2. Case study interview data base

	Social service provider	Government commissioner	Investor/intermediary	Evaluator	TOTALS
UK case	11	1	1	1	14
German case	2	2	3	2	9
TOTALS	13	3	4	3	23

Source: Compiled by authors.

Our UK case study is centred on a northern English city, where an initial SIB-financed project (2013–2018) was followed by a second SIB-financed project (2018–2022) involving many of the same local actors featuring some significant changes in terms of the contractual design. The first contract was to deliver services for over 1,000 young people on the verge of becoming NEET (not in education, employment or training). The second contract was to support around 100 care leavers as they transitioned from state-run care services to independent lives through dedicated coaching and a focus on education, employment and training. Our second case study, in a southern German city which ran from 2013 to 2015, serves as an interesting contrast due to the missing national level funding architecture in Germany. The intervention was designed around the category of particularly endangered youth, who were defined as ‘hard-to-reach’ and should have neither completed nor already enrolled on any apprenticeship programmes. The target was to place at least 20 youths into work or an apprenticeship (subject to social insurance contribution) for more than nine months within the regional district. In contrast to our UK case study – in our German case, there was no follow-up SIB-financed programme, even though a follow-up project had been envisaged from the beginning.

4. Findings

In our comparative case study, we identify two analytical levels through which assetization struggles play out: first, on the level of the creation of reliable revenue streams for investors, and second, on the level of the organization of social work at the social service provider. Below, we explore these assetization struggles in turn. Table 3 provides an overview of the case study results presented in sections 4.1 and 4.2.

Table 3. Overview of cases

	Assetization struggle 1: Are sustainable reliable revenue streams for investors created?	Assetization struggle 2: Does the SIB lead to sustained changes in professional practice?
UK case	Mixed, but ultimately no – Whilst the first local SIB provides low risk/high return profit to investors, the provider organization delivers the second SIB without investors	Mixed – some change to practice ‘SIB-worker mentality’ yet some resistance ‘traditional youth-worker mentality’
German case	No – Only one local SIB is developed. It delivers a high risk/small profit to investors. No further SIBs proposed locally	No – changes resisted by the provider organization. Organizational decoupling

Source: Compiled by authors.

4.1. Assetization struggles concerning high and reliable revenue streams for investors

We identified significant struggles and resistance to assetization in relation to for-profit private investment in public services across both our cases. Firstly, in our UK case study, both the local not-for-profit service provider and local government actors expressed reservations about the encroaching financialized character of welfare provision heralded by the SIB model. Neither were strong proponents for the model but engaged with it for pragmatic reasons following severe cutbacks from 2010 that limited the funding local government could offer to local service providers. For the provider organization, accessing SIB funds was seen as a strategy to diversify its income streams as local government contracts dried up. Likewise, for the local government actors, the opportunity for matched-funding from national government by participating in SIB-financed projects increased the overall amount of money available for local youth and employment services thanks to the national outcomes fund technology motivated their involvement. However, there was significant political resistance from local Labour Party councillors who opposed the SIB policy on ideological grounds, limiting the depth of SIB development in this region.

Turning next to the investors, we identified multiple (international, national and local) investment actors involved in the first SIB-financed project in the UK case site. An intermediary organization brought the different investors together with the local provider working on behalf of national government. A local investor involved in the case stated that the government offered them a higher rate of return on the investment than they would normally seek:

The interest rate was slightly higher than we would ordinarily charge anyway, so we put our money out at 6.5 per cent in the main, and all the Social Impact Bonds we looked at were all offering between 7 per cent and 10 per cent. (Investor, UK case)

This underlines the desire of national government during this time to attract investors and further the SIB agenda of a de-risking state and the generosity of the outcomes fund technology for investors. It also may indicate why the other actors (providers, local government and local politicians) were uncomfortable about the extractive nature of the SIB model.

The first SIB in this case study site was structured through a special purpose vehicle (SPV) model. Initial capital was drawn down by the provider organization as needed in the early stage of the programme. The provider organization had none of its own money at risk. The SPV board scrutinized monthly performance data against targets listed in the central government rate card and billed the government accordingly. Over the lifetime of the first SIB project here, the rate card targets were hit, and the outcomes funds flowed back to the investors. The investor profits were so high that one of the more socially-minded investors shared its revenue with the provider organization, without any contractual necessity – perhaps running counter to assetization logic.

In an interesting development, the follow-up SIB at this site is structured very differently. In the second project, the provider organization set up its own SPV and effectively invested in itself to deliver agreed outcomes listed in a new government rate card (through a different outcomes fund) as the main investing party overall. The key development between SIB 1 and SIB 2 in this site is the way the provider organization shifts from being a mere service provider delivering rate card outcomes to deliver returns for a group of investors to become an auto-investor. According to the service provider, the second SIB offered:

funding for a service that we thought we could deliver really well, so it was a significant amount of funding for a charity the size we were, that we wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise. We wouldn’t have taken out a loan for any other work at that moment in time because we wouldn’t have had the additional funding coming in so, you know, it felt like it was a little bit risky but not so risky because it’s small and we know what we’re doing, and we’d established a good team. (Provider manager, UK case)

There are no external investors involved in the second SIB project, nor any role for an intermediary or any external independent evaluation. This is a subversion of one of the key elements of the original SIB concept (i.e. that investors and intermediaries are needed to oversee and ‘professionalize’ charitable providers in a subordinate SPV position). Essentially, the provider saw more downsides than upsides in working with investors, so they cut them out of their second SIB contract. We suggest that this poses interesting questions in terms of how actors struggle with or may subvert assetization as the SIB in this locality did not establish a reliable and continued revenue stream for investors.

We see even greater hesitation towards investors and to high investor profits in the German case. Unlike the UK cases (with its active de-risking state, through outcomes funds and rate card technologies), the risk in the German case was shouldered by the investors through a rigorous outcome-set up with an all or nothing payment structure that paid at the end of the project, only in the case of overall project success. It is notable that the local government commissioners were keen to demonstrate the ‘additionality’ of the project and the avoidance of high private profits. They wanted to establish a showcase for the SIB in Germany and were keen on avoiding the potential for bad publicity should private investors be perceived to be exploiting social work. In official communication, the 3 per cent profit on the invested capital of 250,000 euros that was gained in the end, was termed an ‘inflationary adjustment’, in order to downplay the financialized character of the instrument in contrast to the double-digit rates of return on offer in UK cases (see e.g. Shiva, 2023). Whilst there were the hopes for a much bigger follow-up on the investor side, this did not occur due in large part to local government actor caution. So, in the German case, full-fledged assetization was prevented. We may conclude that the assetization struggles in the German case were resolved in favour of public sector finance and budgets. One of the investors commented:

I think from the government side there was really this resistance of kind of paying a financial return, proper financial return … I think that the welfare system in Germany works really well, so it’s not that we have a funding problem … it’s stupid to say but there’s enough money for the social system and so we don't need another funding tool for Germany. And the other thought was that why should we bring in investors that are looking also for a financial return, when the German state can have a loan for minus 0.5 per cent. Why should we pay 3 per cent /4 per cent /5 per cent, maybe 7 per cent to investors, or even 1 per cent, yeah, if we get money for free as a German state? (Investor, German case)

In both the UK and German cases our data highlight assetization struggles, in relation to the investor role and level of returns. In the UK case, we identify pro-assetization tools and instruments (such as the national government rate card scheme, national outcomes funds and also significant tax reliefs for social impact investors), but these may, interestingly enough, become circumvented on the local level, where SIBs are administered and implemented. In the German case – absent the central government technologies to support assetization processes as in the United Kingdom – the SIB concept appears to offer too little to investors to engage them beyond a small number of pilot cases, which do not lead to significant second phases or follow-ups.

4.2. Assetization struggles concerning the organization of social work

A second important dimension of potential assetization through the SIB instrument is the reorganization of social work at the practice level. In this section we explore if, how and in what ways processes linked to assetization may impact the work that social workers do. We suggest that assetization may be seen to have taken place when social work is significantly influenced and structured by the asset condition of the SIB, and assetization may not have occurred when there is a ‘decoupling’ (Meyer & Rowan, 1977) between the administrative question of funding and documentation, and the concrete social work on the ground.

The most significant finding with respect to the German SIB case study is the establishment of due diligence and high-profile documentation. The increased burden of documentation, more generally, typifies the trust problems in outsourced governance regimes (termed the principle-agent problem in economics) mimicking the financial investor rationale, requiring documentation in order to validate the quality and risk of an investment. In our case, it is interesting to see this call for augmented documentation and transparency is demanded from the local government commissioner, who was concerned with preventing ‘creaming’ and with the proof for the SIB project being ‘additional’. The local government commissioner was heavily occupied with ensuring the investors shoulder the financial risk of the project (as promised in the SIB narrative), and that the project would not interfere with other welfare state actors’ responsibilities.

The defined goal was to bring 20 difficult-to-reach young people into work or an apprenticeship for at least nine months. The intervention was designed around the category of ‘particularly endangered youth’, who were defined as ‘hard-to-reach’ and should have neither completed nor already enrolled on any apprenticeship programmes, not be attending school, were currently unemployed, and have neither had contact with an employment agency nor participated in and agency’s programme two years before establishment of contact. Furthermore, they needed to be below the age of 25 and placed into a job or an apprenticeship for at least nine consecutive months in order to be categorized as a ‘success’. The target was to place at least 20 youths into work or an apprenticeship (subject to social insurance contribution) for more than nine months within the regional district. This required documentation that participants had not attended the job centre for a defined time and that there is official paperwork to prove they are hard-to-reach.

Interestingly though, the requirements to classify hard-to-reach unemployed young people and to separate them from those less hard-to-reach did not change the social work practice and ethos on the ground. This practice is described as ‘decoupling’ in organizational theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). The social workers continued working as before, since for them the sharp categorial distinction was not practically feasible. The SIB classification, to them, was only important in terms of documentation, and did not impact upon their social work ethos and practices. Interview data indicates frustration with the detailed due diligence requirements. The external evaluator states:

[T]he [social workers] had, I think, really struggled with this [increased] documentation. And then of course they had a lot to do with me. Because I had to check these registration certificates and the certificates from the employment office and so on. I think all that was a bit too inflated for them regarding administration. … There was once a two-week period missing, which was not confirmed. So, I said, I need the confirmation for the whole period. And then we had to look for someone who was confirmed and resident. Things like that … (Evaluator, German case)

The service provider had experience with other funding agencies that also required documentation on how many young people are placed into employment or training. Informants stated that the conventional (non-SIB) approach was preferable due to a much more realistic approach towards ‘failures’ in social work programmes. They would, for example, acknowledge more the complex realities of these youngsters coming from difficult backgrounds, and the necessity of being a reliable partner to them and to not let them down, even if such youngsters count as a non-success or a non-fit in the financial set-up. Through this logic, the relevance of documentation is acknowledged, but more in terms of an overall assessment, not with an individual level rigidity, as indicated by the evaluator in the above interview passage. So, the German picture is one of organizational decoupling with respect to assetization.

Turning to our UK case study, assetization appears to have made greater inroads in relation to the practice of some social work and social worker identities beyond the financial and contractual matters. Like in Germany, a significant issue for the UK provider organization was the increase in data and monitoring required to prove that payment-linked targets were met – increasing localized bureaucratic requirements. Social work staff were deeply aware of their SIB-related rate card targets and their monetary value through outcomes funds streams. Those working on the SIB-financed services, for example, differentiated between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ rate card targets with the former easier to achieve than the latter and reflected that the first SIB sometimes prioritized ‘easier to reach’ young people in order to appease investors in the first SIB contract. Through the lifetime of the first SIB, it became apparent that some social workers were more comfortable with SIB work than others who appeared less positive about working under these competitive, challenging circumstances linked to the SIB-metrics and monetized outcomes. Social work managers referred to a ‘traditional youth worker’ mentality and suggested this poorly correlated with a ‘SIB worker’ mentality. This motif recurred frequently in interviews with staff throughout different levels of the provider organization. One of the provider informants captures this sense in a long and informative quote below:

One of the big things for us internally, the learning, was the type of staff that you get on these programmes. So, we had – and this is not unique – talking to other SIB providers who’ve said exactly the same, we made an assumption when we staffed [the first SIB project locally] of the type of member of staff that would be perfect, and we basically got that wrong. So, we assumed that a youth worker would be a perfect mentor basically for these children and some youth workers – and I don’t want to generalize – were great but in general the youth workers we recruited … their basic principles in terms of how they work was so against the SIB model, it was a constant issue. So, we’d have the youth workers going into schools, they’d suddenly realize they’d got these ready teams of fantastic people who were doing well with behaviour, and they were being pulled in all directions doing completely unrelated work … And we obviously had to say, you know, you just can’t do that, you’ve got these outcomes to hit. But of course, their ethos was ‘but we go where the need is, we’re not interested in those outcomes. This child needed my help’. So, there was a complete philosophy framework, but also on a practical level – and again this is a massive generalization – but a lot of our youth workers, particularly the best youth workers at engagement, tended to be the worst youth workers in terms of data inputting … and desk work. So, anything that required high levels [of data inputting] – and of course it does in a SIB, you know, you’re tracking children, it’s a high level … That was an absolute nightmare with that type of worker because they didn’t like doing it, sometimes they just point blank refused to do it, etc. So, with [the second SIB project locally] we knew the sort of worker that we wanted and because it was a small team, we did create what we did call the dream team. (Provider organization senior manager, UK SIB)

The ‘SIB worker’ mentality is linked to positive attitudes towards data collection and input, rate card target focus and identified service user prioritization, whilst the a ‘traditional youth worker’ mentality deprioritizes rate card targets and instead prioritises service user need over data recording and the requirement to provide the paperwork that would deliver payments for the organization. The senior social work management team learned from the first SIB-financed project and ensured that only social workers with a ‘SIB worker’ mentality worked on the second SIB-financed project rather than those with a ‘traditional youth worker’ mentality. They also housed the SIB and non-SIB-focused teams in different parts of the building. Notably – it was suggested in interviews that this professional distinction between those more or less comfortable working towards SIB targets was a common issue for providers delivering SIBs and had been discussed in informal networks between managers of SIB-financed services across the United Kingdom.

In organizational terms, this is a form of vertical integration and differentiation at the same time. We see the assetization logic cut through onto the level of work organization. We see in the second SIB-financed project in our UK case study site that the service provider organization develops and makes organizational changes in terms of service delivery. It could be argued that the service provider becoming an investor in itself needs to reorient in terms of outcome management and documentation and an urge for targets and monetized success. This may be seen to change the relationship between social workers and their clients who become ‘investees’ (Feher, 2018), in a process where accounting plays the pivotal role in tying the success or failures of the ‘beneficiaries’ to the financial situation of the service provider organization.

In summary, the tale in our German case study site is one of resistance to assetization logics in terms of social work practice, but in the UK case study site we see a more mixed picture and adaptation (see Table 3). We find assetization struggles even in a UK SIB, where these might be expected to be tamed by the national government outcomes funds infrastructure. We find the participating actors in the German context and in the UK context severely critical towards high and unjustified investor returns and finding ways to avoid these. With the reorganization of social work, the picture in the United Kingdom is somewhat different. Even though the service provider avoided involving investors in the second SIB, assetization cut through onto the level of social work organization, here. In the United Kingdom, the assetized outcome funds infrastructure provides a significant amount of public sector funding, and social service organizations are well-advised to adjust to this new funding logic in making sure that successes of failures of those working and participating in social programmes are tight to monetary values, such as those pre-given in the national government rate card schemes (see Table 1).

We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings below.

5. Conclusion

The SIB is a telling phenomenon to be studied through the assetization framework put forward by Birch and Muniesa (2020), who are interested in describing and understanding financialized assetization (Chiapello, 2023). What Birch and Muniesa make us aware of is the importance of understanding the deep-cutting socio-technical processes of making social worlds investible and creating investor assets from them. Focusing on the asset (instead of the broader trend of financialization) may resonate well with their science and technology studies background. It helps them to see the complex and extensive technicalities of the asset form becoming an important structuring force in capitalist societies. One of the main insights is that the concepts of commodification or marketization may not fully account for what is happening. Instead, it is the maintenance of reliable and manageable revenue streams under the condition of investor uncertainty in markets difficult to predict and difficult to derive income from which is integral. The assetization lens helps us to view how these difficulties are overcome and what it takes to do so. This underscores the (contractual, legal, institutional, calculative, managerial, etc.) rearrangement of social worlds in which we live and work.

Our comparative case study shows the central role of the state in building the social sector asset condition (see also Williams, 2020a, p. 289). In this respect, the rate card-system plays a decisive role. It also attracts those actors that are potentially critical towards the financialized or assetized procurement of social work, such as the local government commissioner and service provider in our UK case study were. Remarkably though, they managed to find ways to prevent assetization in terms of high and reliable investor profits through a subversion of the SIB model by excluding investors. This suggests that assetization (in terms of high and reliable private investor profits) in the social sector is far from being a sure-fire process, and actors may struggle to derive certain investment propositions from it. But in terms of dependence on public sector funding, social service providers need to adapt to the new assetized infrastructure, and they have to build up a monetized documentation scheme of social outcomes.

Our work highlights the necessity of the state acting as the ultimate guarantor of something like an ‘social impact investment market’, which is envisaged by many players in the financial industry and beyond (Barman, 2015; Stolz & Lai, 2020). Our findings suggest that assetization requires something like a ‘lender of last resort’, as Bruce Carruthers and Arthur Stinchcombe (1999) put it with respect to financial market liquidity and stability more general: ‘liquidity in one place presumes “solidity” elsewhere’ (p. 356). In order to engage as an investor or a social service provider in the social impact market, it is important to be able to expect financial power and durability elsewhere, in order to put resources into it and reorient organizational and managerial capacities, such as the service provider did in our UK case. Even though they found a way to become the investor in themselves (and excluded financial investors in the second SIB), they learned to perform in a system that pays for defined and compartmentalized ‘social outcomes’. In the German case, the service provider backed away from the SIB as a funding instrument, since they saw its bureaucratic overload with no financial advantage instead. Here, it was clearly the local government refusing higher margins (combined with a comparably high level of due diligence and documentation asked for) that hindered any sustainable SIB model at this site.

Another insight that can be drawn from our comparative case study concerns the specific bureaucracy and calculative capacity that assetization requires. Assetization is highly bureaucratic and time consuming for those involved in its daily maintenance. A significant and consistent theme emanating from both our German and UK case study data relates to increased documentation and the workload reporting in the creation of the ‘social impact’-category from which monetary values can be deduced. Interestingly though, the qualities of the two calculative set-ups in our German and UK cases are different. The German case devised a documentation regime with an all-or nothing payment structure, where investors could lose or win based on one number after the project’s termination, only. The UK case shows a documentation regime based on a national outcomes fund rate-card, which allows outcome-payments based on compartmentalized targets in-between the run-time of a project (known as ‘the front-loading of capital’).

The payment modus of our German case is an obstacle with respect to assetization. It puts too much risk onto investors, who require a more compartmentalized and an early and ongoing payment-structure. In this respect, the UK case is much more attuned to assetization than the German case, even though both cases provide social impact investing models. The assetization lens highlights the necessity of building a reliable and durable financial structure that allows regular revenue streams to be realized. It is notable that the original SIB promise of a rigid evidence-based evaluation that pays only at the end of a project, based on independently measured long-term outcomes (as with the first Peterborough SIB and mimicked in our German SIB case), is increasingly not found in UK SIBs (Economy et al., 2023). From our analysis of these two SIB-financed programmes we highlight that assetization may be helpfully characterized as a permanent institutional struggle over the realization of reliable and durable rents in an uncertain (market) system that is consistently in danger of break-down. Assetization in the social sector may therefore require immense ongoing institutional effort and may be realized (if so) against significant odds and resistance.

Ethical approval

This study received ethical clearance from the ethics review panel at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2019. Ref: 16119.

Acknowledgements

Both the authors wish to thank Barbara Brandl, Veit Braun and Ute Tellmann for their support, patience and encouragement of this work. We would also like to thank the anonymous referees and the Economy and Society editor for comments that improved the paper. Finally, we thank Debra Hevenstone for her conversations, constructive feedback, and her overall leadership of the project from which we draw our data. The authors remain solely responsible for the findings and claims.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

We would like to thank the Swiss Network for International Studies for funding part of this research. https://snis.ch/projects/new-public-policy-financing-models-innovative-or-ineffective/

Notes on contributors

Lisa Knoll

Lisa Knoll is a sociologist working at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Paderborn, Germany. Her research focuses on sustainable and impact finance, carbon trading and social impact bonds, in particular. Currently, she works as a principal investigator at the joint BMBF-funded project Climate Finance Society (ClimFiSoc) at the University of Paderborn.

Alec Fraser

Alec Fraser is a Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management at King’s Business School, King’s College London, United Kingdom. His research focuses on the use of evidence in policymaking and practice across the public sector. He has researched the development of social impact bonds and outcomes-oriented reforms in public service delivery in the United Kingdom and internationally over recent years.