Networks of knowledge production and mobility in the world of social impact bonds

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Social impact bonds
• policy knowledge
• policy mobilities
• networks
• impact investing

Acknowledgments

A version of this paper was presented at the ASNA Conference in November 2020. The authors would like to thank Dr Adam Hannah for his helpful comments, and the two anonymous reviewers for their insights and suggestions. The usual disclaimers apply. This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program scholarship.

Disclosure statement

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

Declaration of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 SIBs are known as pay-for-success in the US and social benefit bonds in Australia.

2 On the differences between outcomes, outputs and inputs in social policy, see Melville (1998).

3 They have also mutated to operate across national boundaries via Development Impact Bonds, which use the SIB logic for international development programs in the Global South (see Mawdsley 2018).

4 This date range was chosen to reflect the time period in which SIBs have been part of global social policy discourse. The history of their design in the UK is much longer (see Harvie and Ogman 2019).

5 Notably, there are no actors from the Netherlands and only one from Australia present in this list, despite both countries ranking relatively high in quantity of SIBs. In both countries, SIB procurement processes have been driven by government bodies more than elsewhere (Gustafsson-Wright 2020), which may account for the dearth of advocacy-style reports for knowledge formation. The Impact Centre at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, is excluded for its limited number of English publications. Additionally, there is only one government department listed (the UK Department for Communities and Local Government), despite the significant support from governments for the development of the SIB model and the requirement that governments be involved in the enactment of SIB programs. This is because we are interested in the internal dynamics of the SIB policy world, rather than in the ‘agenda setting’ required to elevate SIBs onto ministerial agendas, through which government documents are typically produced. The Department for Communities and Local Government is an exception due to its production of interventions that suited our criteria of ‘knowledge intervention’. Our thanks to an anonymous reviewer for making this point.

6 A network’s density score represents the average proportion of ties between actors within a network (Wasserman and Faust 1994, 102).

7 Brokerage only suggests influence within the SIB knowledge network, and thus can tell us whose knowledge is likely to be presented to government bodies by advocates. For example, the US think tanks that are disconnected from other actors may play significant roles in debates and adoptions of SIBs in their own locales.

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Notes on contributors

Jacob Broom

Jacob Broom is a PhD candidate in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. Jacob’s research interests lie across social policy, political economy, and geography, and his PhD project explores social impact bonds in Australia. His previous research has examined the politics of veganism.

Jordan Tchilingirian

Jordan Tchilingirian is a Lecturer in Political Sociology at the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath. Jordan’s research interests relate to think tanks, policy expertise, and the sociology of knowledge.