Why I don't like Social Impact Bonds

When I first came up with the idea of Social Policy Bonds, their tradeability was an intrinsic part of their identity. Without tradeability, the bonds would be little more than prizes awarded to existing service providers for doing their jobs a bit more efficiently than previously. There's obvious scope for gaming here: perform badly, wait till the government issues SIBs, perform better, then cash in. But perhaps more important is the necessity for allowing new service providers - or, as I term them, outcome achievers - to buy the bonds at any stage and receive extra rewards, in the form of a rise in the market value of their bonds, for performing well. Without tradeability, that won't happen.

The way of the world is that big business and government go hand-in-hand. The way of Social Impact Bonds is is equally familiar and equally dubious: government thinks it knows best who will deliver certain services and rewards them if they improve their performance. These will be existing service providers or, just possibly, new bodies upon which the government is equally keen to bestow favour for some reason or other. The whole point of my Social Policy Bond idea is to bring about creative destruction into the achievement of social and environmental outcomes. Under a Social Policy Bond regime new approaches and new organizations will be rewarded if, and only if, they are more efficient than anyone else. Social Impact Bonds won't do that: existing organizations will be favoured; they will have some incentive to perform their existing functions more efficiently, but little incentive to look at new approaches. For one thing, innovation risks rocking the boat. For another, SIBs, because they are not tradeable, are going to be restricted in their time horizon to that of existing organizations: they will take a short-term view, relative to the complexity of our social and environmental problems. This is a major deficiency: it restricts the scope of the bonds to narrow, short-term goals. As well, the costs of monitoring progress toward such goals is going to be large relative to sums at stake.

Contrast this with Social Policy Bonds, which are not limited by the prejudices of government (or anyone else) as to how our goals shall be achieved nor who shall achieve them. So we can target long-term social goals that will inevitably require diverse, adaptive approaches: reduced crime rates, for example, or improved health. We can even target global goals, like human development or the sustained avoidance of violent political conflict. Governments that issue Social Policy Bonds don't have to take a view as to which organizations are best placed to achieve such goals, nor as to how they shall go about achieving them. That work is done by bidders for the bonds who will be motivated by the rewards they get for helping achieve the targeted outcome. Note the word 'helping': a single organization need not achieve the entire goal to be rewarded under a Social Policy Bond regime: helping raise the likelihood of early achievement of the goal will generate reward in the form of the increased value of the bonds they (or a contracting agent) owns. Social Policy Bonds encourage a coalition of interests, whose composition and structure will change in response to changing circumstances, to co-operate in exploring and implementing a diverse, adaptive array of initiatives with the aim of achieving our broad social goals, even ones as seemingly remote and unattainable as universal female literacy or world peace.

For more on this see my short article: why the bonds must be tradeable. Also previous blog posts. For another critical view of SIBs (in New Zealand) see here. Contact me if you would like to know more.