Now let's try to solve terrestrial problems

The Economist explains how NASA is reducing costs and enhancing efficiency in space exploration:

Over the past ten years NASA has started to move away from the time-honoured model which sees it tell private industry exactly what it wants built and then pay the price, with a handsome guaranteed profit added on. Instead NASA tells companies what it wants done; lets them say how they would do it, how much new stuff they will have to develop and what that will all cost; and then offers fixed-price contracts to the best bids. The enlightened goal is to build up a thriving competitive market in such services. SpaceX is NASA’s biggest lunar rival, the 'Economist', 17 October 2024

This is exactly the model I've been advocating for many years: stipulate the outcome and let market incentives decide who shall achieve it and how they do so. As it's working successfully for space exploration maybe we could think about applying it to terrestrial problems. I'm not sure why we don't. It could be that the politicians and bureaucrats who control spending on social and environmental problems are reluctant to relinquish the power to determine which bodies receive government funding and how they go about achieving our goals. But they would still have the remit to help articulate society's goals and raise the revenue for their achievement. Democratic governments are quite effective in doing those things, but they will persist in dictating both which bodies receive their funding, and how they are to go about achieving our social and environmental goals. That model can work well when the causes of our social problems are easy to identify, but it's less successful when our problems are inescapably complex and long term in nature. Such problems include crime, poor health, climate change and - most deadly of all - war. They probably all require a wide range of diverse, adaptive approaches to their solution, and these are exactly the approaches that government cannot follow. Nor can any single conventional organisation, whose stated goals inevitably get forgotten over time in favour of self perpetuation. 

Social Policy Bonds would do what NASA's doing: contract out the achievement of our long-term social and environmental goals to investors in the bonds, who would have incentives to co-operate with each other with the sole aim of achieving these goals. When the bonds are issued, I envisage that a new sort of organisation will form, whose every activity will be devoted to maximising the efficiency with which investors solve, or pay others to solve, society's problems. Society's goals and those of investors would exactly coincide.