Social Policy Bonds haven't exactly set the world on fire. Despite my high hopes, or naivety, when I first came up with the idea, back in the 1980s, they have not not been issued anywhere. Social Impact Bonds - the non-tradeable variant - have, however, been issued in around 25 countries, according to Wikipedia. They appear in different guises: pay-for-success financing, pay-for-success bond, social benefit bonds, etc. I've had no involvement with SIBs, and have expressed my ambivalence about them here and here. I have been lucky to be able to spend so much time working on Social Policy Bonds, mainly writing about them here, or on my main website, or in books and papers. I've also given presentations about them at the Universities of Cambridge and St Andrews, and at OECD and think-tanks and conferences in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
However, book sales are in the single digits per annum, and there is a near-universal lack of interest from those whom I thought would be keen to take up the idea: politicians, bureaucrats, academics, philanthropists ...the list goes on.... So I am having now to focus more on earning a living. No bad thing: it's a reminder of what it's like to work for slightly more than minimum wage doing something I do not enjoy, which has no prospects for advancement. That is what life is like for billions of people—if they're lucky! So this is just to serve notice that posting may continue to be thin for a while, though I will keep both this site and SocialGoals.com going. If you have questions, queries or comments on Social Policy Bonds I can always be reached my email, or you may find them addressed on this site or on SocialGoals.com. All my work is downloadable from there, free of charge.
