Toby Lowe, Jonathan Kimmitt, Rob Wilson, Mike Martin* and Jane Gibbon

This blog post was originally published on the Discover Society – Policy and Politics blog on 4 December 2018.

In 2010, the UK’s Ministry of Justice established the first Social Impact Bond (SIB) – a new policy tool, designed to link the outcomes of social interventions to payments. The idea was that the financial risk of these interventions would be borne by a private investor rather than public funds. In our recent research article published in Policy & Politics, we set out to offer one of the first detailed accounts of how these mechanisms are created and implemented. Our results highlight three levels of analysis (macro, intermediate and micro) where tensions and congruencies can be found.

Continue reading →