Social Impact Bonds

The aim of this article is to describe social impact bonds as an innovative instrument for financing social services. The first part presents the nature of this solution in its economic, institutional and legal aspects. Then we analyse the chances of social impact bond development taking into account the labour market and the financial market. In the next part, the authors present a proposal to use the model of social impact bonds in employment support services. The summary is a critical analysis of the model, presenting its weaknesses and relevant remedial strategies.

Since the end of the American Civil War, scholars have debated the efficacy of various models of community economic development, or CED. Historically, this debate has tracked one of two approaches: place-based models of CED, seeking to stimulate community development through market-driven economic growth programs, and people-based models of CED, focused on the removal of structural barriers to social and economic mobility that prevent human flourishing. More recently, scholars and policymakers have turned to a third model from the impact
investing community—the social impact bond, or SIB. The SIB model of CED ostensibly finds a middle ground by leveraging funding from private impact investors to finance social welfare programs within marginalized communities. SIBs seemingly answer the call of local government law scholars of the New Regionalists movement who advocate for governmental mechanisms that facilitate regional cooperation, address equity concerns, and respect local government autonomy. However, this Article argues that the SIB model of impact investing will struggle to advance metropolitan equity due to its grounding in the politics of neoliberalism.

After highlighting limitations of the SIB, this Article links contemporary debates about CED theory to historical contestations within the black community about economically-oriented racial uplift strategies. Placing historical figures, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, in conversation with more contemporary theorists of political philosophy, this Article offers an alternative conceptual framework of CED. Termed justice-based CED, this framing distinguishes a typology of social change that places democracy at the epicenter of the development debate and points toward the political principles of the solidarity economy as guideposts for law reform. The justice-based approach rests upon three core values: social solidarity, economic democracy, and solidarity economy. Taken together, this perspective reflects a vision of political morality that embodies one of America’s most foundational democratic values—human moral dignity.

Οι Φορείς της Κοινωνικής και Αλληλέγγυας Οικονομίας, προκειμένου να είναι σε θέση να προσφέρουν στην κοινωνία και στο γενικότερο οικοσύστημα, έχουν ανάγκη χρηματοδότησης και διασφάλισης των αναγκαίων πόρων, τουλάχιστον κατά τα πρώτα στάδια ίδρυσης τους. Ανάμεσα στις εναλλακτικές πηγές της κοινωνικής χρηματοδότησης που μπορούν οι Φορείς να αντλήσουν κεφάλαια είναι η Χρηματοδότηση από το Πλήθος και τα Ομολόγων Κοινωνικού Αντικτύπου. Η Χρηματοδότηση από το Πλήθος (Crowdfunding) είναι μια μέθοδος άντλησης κεφαλαίων, μέσω της συλλογικής προσπάθειας φίλων, οικογενειών, πελατών και μεμονωμένων επενδυτών, χάρη στη χρήση ψηφιακών πλατφόρμων και κοινωνικών δικτύων. Τα Ομόλογα Κοινωνικού Αντικτύπου (SIBs), από την άλλη, σχετίζονται με την πολιτική θεωρία του Νέου Δημόσιου Μάνατζμεντ που επικρατεί τα τελευταία χρόνια. Μέσω των αυτών επιδιώκεται: 1. η παροχή υπηρεσιών από κοινωνικές επιχειρήσεις υπό συνθήκες δημοσιονομικής λιτότητας, 2. την καλύτερη δυνατή αξιοποίηση των δημοσίων πόρων και 3. τη μεταφορά του ρίσκου χρηματοδότησης στους επενδυτές. Συνοπτικά, το Crowdfunding σχετίζεται με την προσέλκυση κεφαλαίων από των Ιδιωτικό Τομέα, ενώ τα SIBs σχετίζεται με την προσέλκυση κεφαλαίων από τον Ιδιωτικό Τομέα (αρχικά) και τον Δημόσιο Τομέα στη συνέχεια, εφόσον επιτευχθούν οι στόχοι που έχουν τεθεί. Σκοπός της παρούσας εργασίας είναι η μελέτη των ανωτέρω πηγών χρηματοδότησης και των ευκαιριών που δημιουργούνται για τη χρηματοδότηση των εγχειρημάτων Κοινωνικής και Αλληλέγγυας Οικονομίας.

This paper frames social finance in its broadest terms as an alternative to traditional corporate responsible practice, highlighting the significance and potential of social finance in mobilising financial resources for global social development. This paper explains social finance as an approach employing financial resources drawn from "the market" to generate positive social impacts which can, depending on instruments, also deliver financial returns. Despite hitherto forms of capitalism generating economic asymmetry, there is an urgent need for a more equitable financial mobilisation through innovative finance. Such a need has generated a paradigm shift in the corporate sector where actors in the private sector are increasingly using a variety of instruments to utilise private money for public good - social finance. We have so far seen corporate responsible business practices, yet with innovation and multi-sectoral partnerships, it can potentially bring the most significant change that has yet to be witnessed globally.

Since 2008, crisis governance strategies have been dominated by forms of economic and political retrenchment, seen in the policies of fiscal austerity (Peck 2012) and through the insulation of policy decisions from popular power in a “post-democracy” (Crouch 2011; Jessop 2013a). However, this has exacerbated the crisis of social reproduction and further eroded political legitimacy. As a result,  we're witnessing the growth of “active” state policy focused on “social impact”, implemented through the “inclusive” practices of cross-sector collaboration with civil society. This presentation focuses on a critical example of this development, that of the “Social Impact Bond” (SIB).
Introduced in the U.K.'s “Big Society” programme in 2009, more than 40 SIBs now exist throughout the E.U., the U.S., and in both the global North and South. These promise to “blend fiscal and social returns” through a financial product based on the performance of targeted social policy interventions. In times of austerity, these claim to leverage private capital for public good, by offering private returns to investors when programs effectively lower levels of recidivism, unemployment, homelessness, and hence lower government expenditures.
This presentation will both describe the structure of this policy instrument, and consider its broader political significance as a crisis governance strategy. I will situate SIBs within a specific “hegemony project” (Kannankulam and Georgi 2014) that explicitly responds to the social crises of “trickle-down economics”, yet which simultaneously rejects a politics of redistribution. My presentation will therefore focus on how SIBs discursively construct the crisis and an “imagined recovery” (Jessop 2013b), and also shape and limit the institutional “corridors” for political action (Brand 2014).

Brand, Ulrich. 2014. “State, Context and Correspondence. Contours of a Historical-Materialist Policy Analysis.” Österreichische Zeitschrift Für Politikwissenschaft 32 (4): 425–42.
Crouch, Colin. 2011. The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Jessop, Bob. 2013a. “Finance-Dominated Accumulation and Post-Democratic Capitalism.” In Institutions and Economic Development after the Financial Crisis, edited by S. Fadda and P. Tridico, 83–105. London: Routledge. http://bobjessop.org/2014/04/01/finance-dominated-accumulation-and-post-democratic-capitalism/.
———. 2013b. “Recovered Imaginaries, Imagined Recoveries: A Cultural Political Economy of Crisis Construals and Crisis Management in the North Atlantic Financial Crisis.” Before and Beyond the Global Economic Crisis: Economics, Politics and Settlement, 234.
Kannankulam, John, and Fabian Georgi. 2014. “Varieties of Capitalism or Varieties of Relationships of Forces? Outlines of a Historical Materialist Policy Analysis.” Capital & Class 38 (1): 59–71.
Peck, Jamie. 2012. “Austerity Urbanism: American Cities under Extreme Economy.” City 16 (6): 626–55.

Since Andrew Carnegie penned his famous Gospel of Wealth in 1889, corporate philanthropists have championed considerable public good around the world, investing in a wide range of social programs addressing a diversity of public issues, from poverty to healthcare to criminal justice. Nevertheless, the problem of “the Rich and the Poor,” as termed by Andrew Carnegie in his famous essay, remains unsolved. Socially conscious investors have recently called for America to reimagine a new “gospel of wealth”, one that not only grapples with the what of social injustice, but also explores the how and the why of systemic social and economic inequality. An emerging social finance tool, the social impact bond (“SIB”), has been praised as a promising platform that can help solve many of our social challenges by targeting impact investments toward traditionally underfunded social welfare programs.

This Article sets forth a critical examination of the new SIB model, highlighting some of the opportunities for the social finance tool to promote social impact, while also revealing several of its challenges that may hinder its broader adoption in communities across America. In the process, this Article exposes key flaws inherent in the design of the SIB model, including its neoliberal emphasis on market-based economic development strategies and its disregard for the primary role of government in the protection and advancement of the public good. It concludes by calling for a more progressive economic development framework to guide the implementation of the SIB model, one that can help development practitioners, philanthropists, and impact investors wrestle with the deficiencies of our global capitalist economic system and overcome the entrenched systemic barriers to economic justice in America.

O presente artigo busca analisar o modelo do “Contrato de Impacto Social”, referenciado em países da Europa e EUA como “Social Impacts Bonds”, enquanto instrumento de coprodução na prestação efetiva de tarefas públicas, em harmonia com o mais atual paradigma da Administração Pública, conhecida como “a nova governança pública”. Para tanto, o presente trabalho buscará explicitar os contornos teóricos do modelo de “Nova Governança Pública”, especialmente o modelo da “coprodução”, enquanto instrumento de efetividade na execução de serviços públicos, em sentido amplo, conforme exemplos mundialmente observados. Conhecer essas diretrizes da coprodução de serviços públicos é essencial para, em seguida, este trabalho melhor identificar as principais características jurídicas e operacionais do modelo de Contrato de Impacto Social. Além disso, este artigo fará um estudo de caso acerca da execução de um Contrato de Impacto Social, promovido pelo Estado de Nova York, cujo objeto é a redução do alto índice de reincidência criminal, bem como de uma tentativa de sua implantação pelo Estado de São Paulo, porém sem a necessária retaguarda jurídica. O presente artigo buscará demonstrar que o Contrato de Impacto Social é uma espécie de project finance initiative, cuja regulamentação é essencial no Brasil, não apenas em razão da existência de casos bem-sucedidos, mas especialmente diante da adequação de sua adoção com as diretrizes mais atuais de eficiência na realização de tarefas reservadas à Administração Pública.

Una panoramica generale basata sulle principali fonti della letteratura in materia di impact investing. Definizione, storia, premesse al suo sviluppo, gli impact investing nel mondo, opportunità, criticità e sfide della nuova finanza sociale

This article about the convergence of media and education corporations details the tendencies of for-profit companies to standardize, homogenize, and automate knowledge, curriculum, and pedagogy. The first section reviews the policy trends that established the standards, standardization, and technology regime that created the conditions for the education
media/tech convergence and its consequences. The second section examines the economic interests driving the expansion of media and education companies with a particular look at the expansion of tablet products. The third section discusses the political and cultural implications of these trends.

Latin America is a region with less economic and human development than Western Europe and the United States, but tends to show higher levels of happiness. Is that inconsistent? This article reviews the individual conditions that favor happiness of the Latin Americans and how they could explain the apparent contradiction in the macrosocial indicators of well-being. Firstly, it is noted that for the Latin American people there is less association between economic and human development with happiness; secondly, it is suggested that greater subjective well-being in the region is due to the higher density and quality of the family ties.

artigo originalmente publicado na Arbitragem Administrativa, n.º 2, 2016, CAAD 1. Introdução e razão de ser O investimento de impacto social está a mudar, simultaneamente, o modo como olhamos para dois setores essenciais da economia. Por um lado, surge como um terceiro pilar de financiamento do Terceiro Setor , ao lado da tradicional filantropia e dos apoios públicos; por outro lado, surge como 1 outro mercado de investimento, utilizando quase todos os instrumentos típicos dos mercados de capitais. Explicado de uma forma muito sucinta, que nos permita avançar rapidamente para o objeto principal do nosso artigo, o investimento de impacto social não procura a título principal o lucro e a sua maximização, mas sim a resolução (ou contribuição para a resolução) de um problema social. Dito de outro modo: "the defining characteristic of impact investment is that the goal of generating financial returns is unequivocally pursued within the context of setting impact objectives and measuring their achievement" . Os vetores da quantificação, medição e avaliação são fundamentais 2 para se compreender o investimento de impacto social. Apenas eles permitem dar elementos aos investidores para determinarem o grau de risco do seu investimento face ao potencial impacto social que com ele atingirão. Assim, o investimento de impacto social pressupõe investidores que conhecem, quer os problemas sociais em causa e como pode ser medida a sua resolução, quer as organizações sociais que trabalham para os resolver e os métodos que utilizam. Estes elementos permitem já compreender que, como todo o investimento, o investimento de impacto implica uma teia de relações, a assunção de riscos por todos os envolvidos e o potencial de haver conflitos quanto ao desenvolvimento do investimento ou quanto aos seus resultados. É neste ponto que Setor Social, Setor Solidário, Setor Não Lucrativo. Utilizaremos todas estas expressões em sinonímia no presente artigo, não obstante 1 ser teoricamente possível estabelecer distinções entre estes conceitos. Impact Investment: the invisible heart of markets, 2014, pág. 18, disponível em: http://www.socialimpactinvestment.org/reports/ 2 Impact%20Investment%20Report%20FINAL[3].pdf (última visualização em 20.07.2016) de 1 9

This text provides a critical inquiry into the increasingly popular policy experiment of “Social Impact Bonds” (SIBs). It looks into the way SIBs are advanced in response to the multifaceted crisis of neoliberal hegemony and to the problems associated with the predominant austerity paradigm. SIBs are being promoted as a way of “counter(act)ing austerity” (JP Morgan, 2011) by “us[ing] private capital for public good.” (US National Advisory Board on Impact Investing, 2014: 4) This rejuvenated Third Way project seeks to incentivize non-governmental investment in social service provision in the face of a fiscal-cum-social crisis, by offering a new financial product based on the performance of social policy outcomes.
I approach this topic from a Cultural Political Economy (CPE) perspective (Sum & Jessop, 2013). This means analyzing the political significance of SIBs as a response to the current crisis and as part of a process of reproducing and reworking neoliberal hegemony. In this analysis, CPE combines critical political economy and critical discourse analysis to investigate both the material and symbolic causes and implications behind the variation, selection and retention of specific policies and policy discourses in this particular historical conjuncture (ibid.: 184–187).
The next section recounts the emergence of SIBs, which occurred in three stages. It begins with the intellectual origins of SIBs, approximately two decades ago as part of the move towards a post-Washington Consensus. Here, I address both the discursive and institutional aspects. This involves a Third Way discourse about “responsible capitalism” in connection with a “neo-corporatist” (Jessop, 2002: 461) practice involving a “negotiated approach” between market actors, governments and civil society. Next, I move on to the stage of policy selection during which SIBs go from being an idea to an agenda within policy think tanks and state institutions. This occurred during and immediately following the implosion of the financial markets in 2007-08. It shows how SIBs first became framed as an ethical market response to the problems of the financial crisis and, later, as a way to respond to negative social effects caused by public sector budget cuts. The third stage focuses on the implementation of SIBs as a policy experiment as well as their retention in state institutions. This provides some examples of state restructuring measures by which SIBs are implemented.
Following the description of the three stages of SIB emergence, I introduce the case of the Peterborough Social Impact Bond, which was presented as an effort to reduce recidivism among inmates released from the municipal jail. Here, I present the theory of SIBs and use the specific case to illustrate how the SIB is expected to play out in reality. A focus on a core strand of the SIBs discourse, especially the idea of reducing public expenditure follows.
Afterwards, I describe SIB implementation and reveal the contradictions between theory and practice: While the intervention successfully reduced reoffending, it failed to reduce public expenditures. As a result, the state was not able to create savings from which it could share these with investors. Instead, it was compelled to increase expenditure in spite of its supposed fiscal problems, forming special “outcome funds” to pay investor returns. Furthermore, these contradictions did not prevent the government from hailing it as a success or using it to justify the further expansion of SIB projects across the country.
In conclusion, I present the implications of this case for the analysis of policy experimentation as part of the reproduction of hegemony. I argue that this ability of neoliberalism to “fail forward” (Peck, 2012: 6) has much to do with the political blockage preventing genuine alternatives from arising. But these alternatives are not completely eliminated, but rather, their elements are partially and selectively integrated into existing structures. In this case, the popular desire for the economy to make a positive societal contribution is incorporated into existing modes of neoliberal governance through new market-based public responsibility initiatives. These processes are shaped by relations of discursive, technological, structural and agential power (Sum & Jessop, 2013: 218–219), by which economic and profit imperatives over-determine the aspirations that seek to constrain or transcend them. Hence, I describe SIBs as part of a “social neoliberal” strategy or “hegemony project” (Kannankulam & Georgi, 2014: 63) that forges a compromise between “leftist” concerns over the deepening social crisis and the desire for a moral economy, with “rightist” goals of reducing social expenditures and expanding marketisation.

Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) are a new funding tool that uses private capital to fund preventative social interventions. A new idea generating high levels of excitement and controversy, advocates see SIBs as a vehicle for innovation, while critics fear that they will be used by government to offload social spending. In fact, it is still early days and the evidence is not yet available to determine their success, failure, threat or promise. This Sector Signal looks at the early experiences of NFP service providers in SIBs and examines challenges and opportunities of the model.

This paper explores the financialization of philanthropy. Motivated by a recent surge of interest in social impact investing, microcredits and nonprofit rating agencies, I compare structural characteristics of the financial sphere and an evolving 'social investment' paradigm of the philanthropic sector and find a broad range of structural parallels. I argue that financialization, thus understood, is part of a broader project of marketization which aims at reshaping philanthropy along the lines and logics of financial capitalism and I discuss the consequences of these developments.
A revised version of this paper is forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Philanthropy.

The article analyses the UK government's plans to create a social investment market. The Big Society as political economy is understood as a response to three aspects of a multi-faceted, global crisis: a crisis of capital accumulation; a crisis of social reproduction; and, a fiscal crisis of the state. While the neoliberal state is retreating from the sphere of social reproduction, further off-loading the costs of social reproduction onto the unwaged realms of the home and the community, it is simultaneously engaging in efforts to enable this terrain of social reproduction to be harnessed for profit. Key to this process are specific government policies, the creation of new financial institutions and instruments and the introduction of the metric of 'social value'. Policies ostensibly aimed at resolving the crisis in ways that empower local communities actually foster further financialisation and a deepening of capitalist disciplinary logics into the social fabric.

This article considers how the development of for-profit artificial intelligence (AI) technologies fosters the privatization of public education and erodes the values and practices of democratic education. The introduction situates the advent of digital technologies in the context of the structural economic and ideological shifts of the past 40 years. Such changes include neo-liberal restructuring, the repressive school and social turn, changes in the use of positivist ideology in schooling, the role of new technologies in social and cultural reproduction and changing imperatives for capital accumulation. The article illustrates different uses of AI as part of the technological turn of public education privatization. Examples include: (1) adaptive learning technology, and transformations to teacher work and conceptions of knowledge and learning; (2) biometric pedagogy and the cultural politics of locating learning in the body; and (3) the convergence of impact investing and digital surveillance technologies. The article considers how changes in the ownership and control over different aspects of public education relate to the cultural politics of knowledge and learning. It also examines how, under the guise of disinterested objectivity and neutrality, particular class and cultural ideologies and interests are promoted through new technologies, with significant pedagogical, cultural, economic and political implications. The article concludes by arguing that AI education is a site of cultural and political contestation and must be comprehended as a form of representational politics. By showing a critical pedagogical AI project, the article suggests that the anti-democratic tendencies of most AI education is hardly inevitable or determined, but rather represents a replication of long-standing ideologies.

Research introduced here draws on over two years of ongoing qualitative work of low-level drug dealers in a Mexico City neighborhood. Through interviews and participant observation, we explore the social mechanisms that sustain and facilitate informal drug dealing. Our findings indicate that the sale of illicit products, especially drugs, is a needed supplement to household income that expands and contracts according to economic need. Drug selling is integrated into the context of small licit (front) businesses in which dealers sell small amounts of marijuana and cocaine to trusted clients as a (back) business. These “back businesses” are protected by those who operate them, and family, community members, and corrupt officials who benefit from their existence. Finally, the dealers that we studied occupy a unique niche in the overall structure of drug dealing in the neighborhood by remaining under the radar by not attracting the attention of drug cartels.

After the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent cuts in public spending, our welfare system is turning from a redistributive model into a model based on involvement of private actors in the process of planning and funding well-being services. The fall of the public sector is in fact the gradual rise of contractual prototypes similar to social impact bond developed in the UK: the private actors fund public services and the government agrees to repay investors with savings the government accrues as a result of certain social outcomes. The coexistence of economic return and social purposes raises the question concerning the compatibility of the new subsidiary welfare models with the principles of our legal system. Definitly, a better approach would be looking to the interests really fulfilled by the parties, in order to verify if and when they are worthy of protection.

This article analyzes the development of a new modality of public-private partnership in Brazilian education, the so-called Social Impact Bond (SIB), known in Brazil as “Contrato de Impacto Social”, whose pilot project, sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), is in its initial stage of implementation in the State of São Paulo. Unlike traditional philanthropy, which legitimizes itself in the alleged non-profit nature of its actions, SIB assumes the possibility of obtaining return rates with “social investments,” leading to the creation of a new ecosystem of social finances, which, into this context of privatization of education, incorporates agents interested in capitalizing on the provision of public services to vulnerable populations, in this case, to secondary students from public schools in the State of São Paulo. This kind of contract, or bond—paid by means of “delivery” of results—raises a series of ethical, legal, and political-pedagogical issues related to the accomplishment of “social experiments” with students in a vulnerable condition. From the analysis of internal documents of the Department of Education in the State of São Paulo, in comparison with documentary sources from public schools, we conclude that, from the very beginning of its implementation, the SIB of São Paulo education not only breaks with standards of scientific ethics, but also violates the principle of democratic school management included in the Brazilian constitution.

This paper focuses on differences in political contexts of emergence and development process of SIBs in the UK and Japan. In this analysis, the difference in political contexts underpinning SIBs development is explored through examining circumstance of marketization and institutionalization in the UK's and Japan's SIBs. To explore this research agenda, this study used both qualitative and quantitative researches on SIBs in Japan and the UK. In conclusion, SIB stakeholders in the UK are more NPG (New Public Governance) oriented in that social investors and commissioners favor inter-organizational collaboration with social sector. By contrast, in Japan, investors and commissioners have payed less attention to collaboration with social sector organizations. In relation to this, in Japan, policy areas have been less diverse. Service providers and investors tend to voluntarily accept government agendas. In another word, the tendency toward "governmentality" or "institutional isomorphism" among stakeholders of SIB seems to be stronger in Japan than in the UK.

The United Kingdom is at the forefront of a global movement to establish a social-investment market. At the heart of social investment we find finance-and finan-cialisation. Specifically, we find: a financial market (the social-investment market); a series of financial institutions (Big Society Capital, for example); a financial instrument (the social-impact bond); and a financial practice (social investing). Focusing on the UK, given its pioneering role, this paper first provides a brief history of social investment, tracing its development from the politics of the 'Third Way' to the social-impact bond. It then maps the terrain of the social-investment market, explaining the main institutions and actors, and the social-impact bond. Finally, it proposes a framework for analysing the disciplinary logics of finance, which it uses to understand the promise or threat (depending on one's perspective) of social investment and the social-investment market.

Since 2010, social impact bonds (SIBs) have invited investors to 'do well by doing good': injecting capital into social welfare projects, and gaining returns based on successful attainment of impacts. A foregrounded interest in behavioral change typifies much of this market (with SIBs aiming to reduce recidivism, truancy, and addiction, for example). Commentators have situated these behavioral concerns within debates on nudging, 'caring capitalism', and the financialization of social welfare. Lesser attention has been paid to how SIB promotional materials transpose behavioral interests into narrative and representational terms. Given their role in fabricating consent for social impact investing, this article questions how promoters narrate SIBs' construction of behavioral changes as objects of investment, both drawing from and reshaping conventions for representing character in the process. Analyzing three examples, I argue that behavior-focused SIB promotional videos depict societal improvement as 'improved character' at scale. By depicting beneficiaries as better able to morally direct their lives, they represent SIBs as path-changing devices, threading more fulfilling life paths through society. They encourage derivative character investments in bundles of bettered behavior, narratively linked to changed life paths at scale.

With the advent of the social impact bond… if Adam Smith were around today, he’d be talking not just about the invisible hand of markets but the invisible heart of markets.
— Sir Ronald Cohen (a.k.a. “high priest of money-making”).

Non academic article

This article analyses Social Impact Bonds with a focus on their adverse effects. They explore the context of Brazil and discuss how legal frameworks are being changed to allow for this kind of PPP/investment. However, such changes do not tackle the perverse incentives, adverse effects of SIBs and risks they pose to the right to education, but instead are focused on promoting an “ecosystem of impact investing” that is crafted to recruit investors and allow for profit.

This entry discusses the relationships between innovative educational finance schemes and the longstanding educational privatization agenda.  It discusses how new technology, impact investing, charters, vouchers, philanthropy and educational repression contribute to the social and cultural reproduction of the class hierarchy.

This article considers proponents' arguments for Pay for Success also known as Social Impact Bonds. Pay for Success allows banks to finance public services with potential profits tied to metrics. Pay for Success has received federal support through the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2016 and is predicted by 2020 to expand in the US to a trillion dollars. As school districts, cities, and states face debt and budget crises, Pay for Success has been advocated by philanthropists, corporate consulting firms, politicians, and investment banks on the grounds of improving accountability, cost savings, risk transfer, and market discipline. With its trailblazing history in neoliberal education, Chicago did an early experiment in Pay for Success. This article provides a conceptual analysis of the key underlying assumptions and ideologies of Pay for Success. It examines the claims of proponents and critics and sheds light on the financial and ideological motivations animating Pay for Success. The article contends that Pay for Success primarily financially benefits banks without providing the benefits that proponents promise. It concludes by

Resumen
Este artículo presenta una reflexión psicoanalítica que retoma algunos conceptos
desarrollados por Freud y Lacan, en torno a la relación que puede establecerse entre
segregación y época actual. La segregación está presente necesariamente desde un
comienzo como una experiencia indiferenciada que posibilita la estructuración del
sujeto y también como una modalidad del lazo social, especialmente visible en las
relaciones con los otros, una hostilidad siempre presente en la vida cotidiana.


Abstract
The article provides a psychoanalytical reflection on the relation between segregation
and present times, on the basis of some of the concepts developed by
Freud and Lacan. Segregation is necessarily present from the beginning, as an
undifferentiated experience that makes possible the structuring of the subject,
and also as a modality of the social bond, which is especially visible in relations
to others, a hostility always present in daily life.

The United Kingdom is at the forefront of a global movement to establish a social-investment market. At the heart of social investment we find finance – and financialisation. Specifically, we find: a financial market (the social-investment market); a series of financial institutions (Big Society Capital, for example); a financial instrument (the social-impact bond); and a financial practice (social investing). Focusing on the UK, given its pioneering role, this paper first provides a brief history of social investment, tracing its development from the politics of the ‘Third Way’ to the social-impact bond. It then maps the terrain of the social-investment market, explaining the main institutions and actors, and the social-impact bond. Finally, it proposes a framework for analysing the disciplinary logics of finance, which it uses to understand the promise or threat (depending on one’s perspective) of social investment and the social-investment market.

Welfare services as commons: value extraction, perspectives of financialization and self-defence of society. This paper seeks to integrate the economic and legal concept of "commons", to propose an interpretation of welfare services as common goods. Only by recovering a conception of welfare as a common good, in fact, it is possible to set aside its further marketization. After describing the value-extraction capacity of economic actors in the various service provision models, we describe the last frontier of value extraction from this sector: the advent of “impact investing”, particularly in the form of the Social Impact Bond. The theme of financialization of the economy has been explored from various perspectives in recent years, but little is still said about the financialization of the welfare. The spread of forms of impact investing – alongside the phenomena of household consumption of advanced financial products (financialization of daily life) – can accelerate the shift from an universalistic public-funded welfare to a particularistic, extremely marketized one. In this scenario the no-profit sector is called upon to play an important role as an innovative service provider. Then, finally we argue that, only the no-profit sector, if supported by an aware and active citizenship, could be the bearer of the deep sense of “welfare as a common good”: if it is not fascinated by the promises of impacts investing, it can constitute the last bastion to defend a truly universalistic and solidaristic welfare.

In what follows, I will first provide an overview of the Impact investing trends and prospects; followed by a brief discussion of the challenges associated with Measuring impact – standards, certifications, regulation. The third section briefly discusses Match-making – connecting innovators with investors. The fourth section focuses on Mobilizing Impact Capital – social impact bonds, impact funds, impact banking, crowd funding, public-private cooperation. This leads me to the final section, which attempts to conclude and carve out a way forward on the issues discussed at the UNECE meeting through the implementation of the research objectives of a pluri-disciplinary action-oriented Diaspora Impact Investing via Crowdfunding research project, which IHEID & EPFL in partnership with a number of International Organizations, NGOs and the private sector, hopefully will be able to launch next year partly thanks to the funding of some of the delegates attending the GIIN Investor Forum in Amsterdam.

ABSTRACT This paper offers a cultural political economy approach to efforts to advance the “social investment market” as a specific crisis management strategy in response to the economic crisis of 2008. Analyzing social impact bonds (SIBs), it looks at efforts to combine market mechanisms with new notions of public responsibility, and structures of accountability often described as “ethical capitalism” today. Three central claims are interrogated, both as forms of framing and resolving the crisis. First, the paper is concerned with SIBs’ approach to socio-economic polarization through the development of preventative services focused on creating “social impact.” Second, it focuses on their efforts to avoid exacerbating the state’s fiscal crisis by allowing for private investment in public services. Third, the analysis shows how SIBs intend to counter the economic problem of slow and uneven growth with its idea of creating “shared value” between society and investors. The text is based on empirical case research into two of the world’s first two SIBs, seeking to reduce prisoner re-incarceration in New York City and Peterborough, UK. It analyzes policy papers and 30 interviews conducted with policy actors, to reconstruct the SIB as an asymmetrical, contradictory, and provisional compromise between actors holding divergent policy agendas. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s concept of “progressive neoliberalism,” it shows how SIBs combine notions of public responsibility with market-based structures of a profit-oriented economy, thereby limiting the effort to re-embed the economy in society. Connecting empirical research to theory, it describes a complex process of negotiation on the conflicted terrain of city politics, between efforts to extend market governance on the one hand, and those initiatives seeking to overcome it, on the other.

This paper frames social finance in its broadest terms as an alternative to traditional corporate responsible practice, highlighting the significance and potential of social finance in mobilising financial resources for global social development. This paper explains social finance as an approach employing financial resources drawn from "the market" to generate positive social impacts which can, depending on instruments, also deliver financial returns. Despite hitherto forms of capitalism generating economic asymmetry, there is an urgent need for a more equitable financial mobilisation through innovative finance. Such a need has generated a paradigm shift in the corporate sector where actors in the private sector are increasingly using a variety of instruments to utilise private money for public good - social finance. We have so far seen corporate responsible business practices, yet with innovation and multi-sectoral partnerships, it can potentially bring the most significant change that has yet to be witnessed globally.

The United Kingdom is pioneering a new model for the delivery of public services, based around the device of a social investment market. At the heart of this social investment market is an innovative new financial instrument, the social impact bond (SIB). In this paper we argue that the SIB promises (partial) solutions to four aspects of the present multifaceted crisis: the crisis of social reproduction; the crisis of capital accumulation; the fiscal crisis of the state; and the crisis of political legitimacy. In this sense, we conceive the social investment market as a crisis management strategy. We draw on evidence from the world’s first SIB, the Peterborough SIB, launched in 2010, as well as from other SIBs, in order to assess the extent to which the social investment market delivers on its four promises. In doing so, we argue that the crisis of neoliberalism and the social investment market are not only in historical correspondence, but in a relation of causality to one another....

This paper will examine the first Portuguese experience with Social Impact Bonds. I will analyze the Portuguese case against the background of elementary education public provision in Portugal. At the outset I aim to stress the advantages and disadvantages of the SIB contractual model and present some comments on how to build and improve from the subject pilot. In particular I will stress several aspects concerning service provision models, procurement mechanisms and governance options. The present paper sets out from a public policy and administrative law perspective as far as these two domains are intertwined in the continental administrative experience. I aimed to analyze the Portuguese Social Impact Bond pilot from the perspective of the lawyer called to advise upon the best or most recommended legal and good governance practices.

“Philosophy and Community Practices” is a project of the University of Turin (Italy)
developed in collaboration with the MondoQui association. Its aim was to test the validity of Philosophy for Communities – inspired by M. Lipman and A.M. Sharp – in terms of community empowerment. In this chapter, we will analyse the design phase, describe the p4c sessions and present the results achieved.