Social impact bonds and the tactics of feasibility: experience from Chile, Colombia and France

Abstract

Public policy innovations such as social impact bonds (SIBs) have prompted critical attention in recent literature. Yet, little is known about the operations they require and the shapes they take. This study contributes to this research agenda through a focus on the problem of ‘feasibility’. We consider this notion as a vernacular preoccupation put forward by SIB practitioners. We theorize this phenomenon with reference to the notions of tactics (making sense of situations in which schematization and ordering are difficult) and trials (the success of an action depending on the transformations it faces in the process of becoming explicit). We focus on how ‘feasibility’ emerged as a distinctive concern in a number of SIB cases in Chile, Colombia and France. We show how this concern translated recurrently into ways of orienting the SIB arrangement toward shapes in which it could prove viable and tractable.