The Economist writes about India:
Bureaucracy runs on risk aversion. Officials worried about anti-corruption bodies award contracts to the lowest bidder, despite having the discretion to weigh up other factors. They splurge on top-tier consultants because it gives them cover for their decisions. A bureaucrat who takes a risk and produces a terrific outcome gets no reward. Why can't India's government build a decent website?, the 'Economist', 28 June 2026
Not much has changed since I began advocating Social Policy Bonds as a means of targeting outcomes. Politicians focus on institutional structures and funding. Bureaucracy, in India and elsewhere, prioritises process. Meantime public political debate is taken up with public images, sound bites, vague promises and identity. The result is government that is inefficient and ineffective, in that it prioritises narrow, short-term goals, while refusing to address urgent, long-term challenges such as budget deficits, environmental depredations, health and violent political conflict. One result is that the gap between government and people is widening in countries democratic or not, the world over.
The gap would narrow if more people participated in policymaking. One
reason, I believe, why we're not very interested is that policy is
formulated in terms that are difficult to relate to outcomes that are
meaningful to natural persons, as distinct from corporate bodies.
Policymakers appear to concern themselves with decisions about funding
for different government agencies, dispensing patronage to big business
and other lobbies, presenting themselves in the best light ... almost
anything, in fact, except outcomes that mean something to real people.
A government that issued Social Policy Bonds would, from the outset,
have to concern itself with social and environmental outcomes. Its main
role would be to articulate society's wishes regarding social and
environmental outcomes, and to raise the revenue that would fund these
outcomes. Unlike most of the current determinants of policy, the
language of outcomes and the necessary trade-offs between them is
comprehensible to people other than politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers
and public relations experts. For that reason, more people would be
drawn into policymaking - an end in itself, as well as a means toward
getting greater public buy-in to the resulting policies.
Expressing policy in terms of outcomes, and the consequent closing of
the gap between public and policymakers would be one valuable benefit
arising from a Social Policy Bond regime. The other would be the much
greater efficiency in achieving social and environmental goals once the
market, rather than a handful of politicians, decides who shall
achieve these goals, and how they shall be achieved.
