Celebrating Success: Dr Toby Lowe, Dr Jonathan Kimmitt, Prof Rob Wilson, Prof Mike Martin and Dr Jane Gibbon

Congratulations to Toby Lowe, Jonathan Kimmitt, Rob Wilson, Mike Martin and Jane Gibbon who won The Bleddyn Davies Prize from the journal Policy and Politics for the paper titled: “The institutional work of creating and implementing Social Impact Bonds“. The Bleddyn Davies Prize acknowledges scholarship of the very highest standard by an early career academic.

“In Toby Lowe, Jonathan Kimmitt, Rob Wilson, Mike Martin and Jane Gibbon’s illuminating article on social impact bonds, the authors offer one of the first detailed analyses of these relatively new policy tools, which are designed to link the outcomes of social interventions to payments and thus transferring the financial risk from governments to private investors. Drawing on the concepts of institutional work and discursive institutionalism, the authors investigate how the social impact bond featured in their case study influenced the rules, norms and decisions of key actors. Identifying two dominant discourses, the article demonstrates how these were found to be congruent at a macro policy level but evidenced tensions between them at meso and micro levels. Their findings show the interdependence of structure and agency in institutional work and the mediating role that discourse plays. Importantly, it also suggests that the effectiveness of social impact bonds depends not just on whether it achieves its outcome targets, but also for how those contracts work and potentially for the type of care received by their beneficiaries, if such tensions associated with the work of setting up a SIB are apparent in other SIB programmes.”

Lowe, T., Kimmitt, J., Wilson, R., Martin, M., & Gibbon, J. (2019). The institutional work of creating and implementing Social Impact Bonds. Policy & Politics, 47(2), 353-370.

Further information can be found here.

The full article available here.