Social Impact Bonds: Issues of Identity and Independence for the Voluntary Sector

This thesis explores Voluntary Sector (VS) engagement with Social Impact Bond (SIB) policy agenda in the UK. SIB’s typically involve three parties: an (social) investor, a public agency and voluntary sector deliverers; and often a fourth party specialist intermediary. SIBs aim to encourage a collaborative approach to public service delivery with these different stakeholders coming together to co-design services that achieve both social change and cashable savings to the state. England has been a pioneer of SIBs which were introduced by the 2010 UK Government during a time when VS organisations faced unprecedented and widespread cuts to their funding. At the beginning of this study, the SIB literature was still relatively limited and emerging, but has grown over recent years. Despite developments in the SIB academic literature, there is a clear gap around the involvement of the VS as SIB delivery partners- a gap which this thesis aims to address. Through the investigation of SIBs as a VS funding mechanism, this study sought to understand issues of identity, distinctiveness and independence for VS organisations in relation to the state and other actors. The thesis takes a novel approach to research methods, contributing to the knowledge of methodological strategies for the study of the VS. The research was conducted using a mixed-method research design combining frame analysis, Q method, focus groups and interviews. Through a new institutionalist approach, data were analysed at micro, meso and macro levels to explore the institutional logics at play in the framing of SIBs at multiple levels so as to understand VS responses, agency and decision-making in relation to SIBs. This thesis provides empirical contributions to knowledge around the VS’s relationship with the state, the evolution of the VS’s role in delivering state social outcomes and VS leaders’ attitudes to increasingly market-based state funding models. The thesis contributes to VS theory by finding that Salamon’s Voluntary Failure Theory (1987) is limited in its application on 21st century VS organisations which are delivering social outcomes on behalf of the state. It concludes that the market-based commissioning processes which give access to state funding in fact continue to embed traditional inequitable power relations between the state and VS organisations.