This special issue, “Social Impact Bonds and the Urban Transformation,” presents a set of articles that examine the tricky implementation process of Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) in diverse urban settings. SIBs are supposed to be an innovative financing tool for welfare states under fiscal pressure. They claim to provide savings for the public sector through particular welfare programs pre-financed by private investors, whose return on investment depends on the capacity of the programs to meet carefully assessed objectives. The special issue brings together actual research on these new financing tools in three U.S. states on early childcare (Tse & Warner), in two prisons in the U.S. and the UK (Ogman), on child-in-danger care in France (Riot), and in development politics (Alenda-Demoutiez). These empirical case studies show the complex implementation of an abstract concept into diverse urban contexts. They show how urban institutions change, but also how the SIB concept can be challenged on that level. Williams shows how a new professional field emerges around these new funding instruments. And Lilley, Harvie, Lightfoot, and Weir discuss the derivate logic enshrined into these tools. The special issue thus provides the interested reader with an overview on the transformative challenges of SIBs in the urban realm.
Acknowledgments
Papers in this special issue were presented at the Social Finance, Impact Investing, and the Financialization of the Public Interest Conference organized by Eve Chiapello and Lisa Knoll at Hamburg University in Germany in March 2017 and supported by the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
About the Guest Editors
Eve Chiapello is Directrice d'Etudes (Professor) at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences), Paris, France (CEMS- CNRS/EHESS FRE 2023), where she holds a chair about the “sociology of the transformation of capitalism.”
Lisa Knoll is a postdoc at University of Hamburg and Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg in a research project funded by the German Research Council on risk practices in the financial sector and in politics. She will be a fellow at the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies“Futures of Sustainability” at the University of Hamburg 2020/2021.
Mildred E. Warner is a Professor in City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the economic development, social service and environmental policies of local governments. She is an international expert on new models of service delivery and finance, especially in the context of privatization and decentralization.