Events

This page contains information on events on issues related to the Centre for Urban research on Austerity.

Workshop: Local Economic Development and Skills Under Austerity

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In this post, Jonathan Payne reports back on a two day workshop on local economic development (LED) and skills policy under austerity held by the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA) in May.

The workshop brought together leading UK academics in the areas of LED, governance and skills to debate the changing institutional landscape around LED in England and the opportunities and constraints afforded by policy commitments to ‘localism’. This afforded a rare opportunity for academics interested in economic geography, local governance and skills to come together and discuss how the ‘localisation’ agenda is playing out in practice.

As Ewart Keep argued, for the last thirty years skills policy in England has tended to be a national project, focused on generalised workforce upskilling in pursuit of government targets. With government now promising to devolve more of the adult skills budget to local areas, there are questions around how much autonomy local areas will have and what level of resource they might draw on. Furthermore, past experience would suggest that a narrow focus upon education and training, or boosting the supply of skills, runs up against problems of weak employer demand for skill, linked to the way many firms in the UK compete, design jobs and manage staff. This is reflected in a high proportion of low skill, low wage jobs compared with many other advanced European countries, relatively low productivity, and problems of ‘over-qualification’ and ‘under-utilisation of skills’ within the workplace. As the UK Commission for Employment and Skills has argued, there are limits to what boosting skills supply can achieve on its own without wider measures to influence the ‘demand side’. The latter requires effective measures such as industrial policy, economic development and business improvement to grow the proportion of high skill jobs and upgrade the skill content of work more generally. Skills policy might work better if integrated and joined up with such activity.

The role of local enterprise partnerships, city-deals and combined authorities is clearly of relevance here for a number of reasons. First, government is promising to ‘empower’ local communities through these mechanisms to drive LED. Second, skills policy is being localised and skills often figure prominently within this agenda. These claims are controversial, particularly in terms of how ‘real’ localism is at time of funding cuts. However, localism is also a moving picture, and if skills and economic development are to be integrated as part of a more holistic approach, then this is one of the few areas where we might look for examples of progress (or not).

Many issues came to the fore during these discussions: the tendency for LED governance to bounce back and forth between different scales and for policy to ‘keep failing forwards’; the uneven capacity of LEPs; the role of power in devolving ‘risk’; the need to understand how local actors comprehend their situation and what motivates their engagement; the tendency for policy to eschew interventions inside the ‘black box’ of the firm; and the question of what ‘localism’ can tell us about the ‘neo-liberal state’ in a period of crisis management and the narratives it constructs. What is clear, however, is that research will be better placed to address such issues where academics work across disciplinary boundaries. LED, governance and skills are an example of one such interface where collaboration is likely to prove particularly fruitful.

Jonathan Payne is Reader in Employment Studies at De Montfort University and a member of CURA (Centre for Urban Research on Austerity) as well as CROWE (Contemporary Research on Organisations, Work and Employment

Workshop: Resistance and Alternatives to Austerity

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Adam Fishwick and Heather Connolly report back on a workshop they convened for CURA on Resistance and Alternatives to Austerity.

On 18th May CURA hosted our one day workshop on ‘Resistance and Alternatives to Austerity’ engaging with a range of distinctive – and innovative – strategies that have emerged in Europe and Latin America that are challenging the dominant turn to austerity. Papers delivered during the panel sessions were grouped around three key themes on workplace occupations, migrant workers’ protest, and alternative ‘grassroots’ mobilisation. The day ended with keynote presentations from Lisa McKenzie and Phoebe Moore that illustrated the sheer range of opposition that the workshop presenters touched upon – from working class neighbourhoods in the UK to the tensions over technology in the workplace.

The panels generated lively debate from participants and speakers (some of which was broadcast on social media via #CURAresistance) with debates centring on the viability of bottom-up forms of resistance, on the role of institutional actors and the state, and the possibilities for developing new subjectivities and forms of agency.

In the first panel, David Bailey and Saori Shibata presented findings from their research in ‘low-resistance’ societies of the UK and Japan and argued that only with what they termed ‘militant refusal’ were austerity measures successfully challenged and reversed. Lucia Pradella discussed the centrality of new migrants in resistance within and against the traditional trade unions in the logistics sector in Italy – highlighting the dynamism of new actors in a sector crucial to global capitalism. Nick Kiersey, finally, drawing on his research into anti-austerity protests in Ireland challenged us to think about the possibilities of developing a ‘left governmentality’ in the ‘slow exit’ from neoliberalism and austerity.

In the second panel, Heather Connolly returned to the theme of migrant workers within and against traditional trade unions in France, presenting her research on the Sans Papiers movement in France and the innovative models of resistance it adopted. Adam Fishwick argued that, despite the return of a bleak period of austerity in Argentina, resistance could still be found in what Ana Dinerstein has termed the ‘concrete utopias’ in the country. Focusing on the recuperated factories, he showed how they offered a distinct alternative beyond the constraints of state. To close the panels, Stuart Price presented some of his findings of a workplace occupation in Spain, discussing tensions between the closing of space for protest and the potential/limitations of new, seemingly spontaneous forms of resistance.

Lisa McKenzie – alongside Stuart Price – brought a powerful visual component to the day, combining images collected in the course of her fieldwork and everyday life in Nottingham and London with ethnographic narratives on working class life under austerity. Her keynote presentation demonstrated the lived realities of austerity from navigating unemployment, to homelessness, to the pervasive class stigmatisation that, in her words, ‘does the work of the policies of austerity’. Running through her talk was a sense of the need to think concretely about the impacts of austerity in order to confront it – to engage directly with the lived, everyday impacts of the assault on the most marginalised and stigmatised communities and individuals. Closing her presentation, two resonant images of young working class men on top of the roof of an elite private school in Nottingham during the 2011 riots and a homeless man under a new luxury development in London neatly captured this sentiment.

Phoebe Moore took us in a different, but related, direction with a vision of the new workplace and the role of technology in reinforcing the lived conditions of austerity, but also in potentially offering ways to confront and resist in uniquely innovative ways. In her presentation, the new techniques in the measurement and management of working life – from worn technologies to new monitoring and surveillance devices – were shown to be a central component of the micro-level practices overseeing workplaces across a range of sectors. But her work also highlighted the means by which this key component of the new discipline of austerity can be confronted. Technology – as much as it represents a mechanism of control in the workplace – was also shown to provide mechanisms for overcoming that control. From the everyday challenging of its use in the workplace, to re-purposing it in practice, to the development of more organised forms of resistance, the potential for subversion was clear.

Overall, the presentations and discussions throughout the day made clear that if austerity is to proceed, it will not continue unchallenged. Drawing on research and expertise in a variety of settings and contexts, the speakers and participants offered a clear sense that the precarious, impoverished futures proposed and practiced by advocates of austerity are not the only future available. Moving forward, the plan from this workshop is to develop a published collection of the papers that consolidates these themes of resistance to the increasingly pervasive practices of resistance, with the aim of continuing collaboration in to resisting austerity.

Dr. Adam Fishwick is Lecturer in Urban Studies and Public Policy and Dr. Heather Connolly Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management at De Montfort University, both are core members of CURA.

Workshop on Labour and Development: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue

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Date and Venue: Wednesday 1st June, 9.30-5pm, Hugh Aston building, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
Conveners: Dr Adam Fishwick and Dr Anita Hammer

Crisis of contemporary capitalism has put labour, development, class struggles and the state at the centre of analysis both in the Global North and the South. This research workshop brings together scholars across a wide range of academic disciplines, including Anthropology, International Political Economy, Industrial Relations, Labour/Economic Geography and Development Studies, and geographical interests including Latin America to South and South-East Asia to Africa.

Our aim is to explore the question: how can we engage across academic disciplines on existing methodological and theoretical limitations in understanding the role of labour in development?

The four interrelated themes around which the sessions and roundtable are organised include:

  • Conceptualising forms of resistance
  • Situating labour and the state
  • Social reproduction and the household
  • Informal economies and precarity

This workshop is a starting point for the establishment of a wider academic network for understanding labour and development with a plan to host a second workshop at the University of Sussex in January 2017.

For more information please contact Dr Adam Fishwick at adam.fishwick@dmu.ac.uk

Workshop on Resistance and Alternatives to Austerity

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The new Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA) at De Montfort University (Leicester) is holding a workshop on Wednesday 18th May 2016 (9.30am-4.30pm) to discuss strategies for resistance and alternatives to austerity in urban settings across the globe. See registration details at the end of the post, for a copy of the programme see here.

“…our rage will be relentless…” Petros Constantinou (Guardian 12/11/15)

Across the globe the deepening of austerity has exposed urban populations across Europe, North America, Latin America, and beyond to worsening living and working conditions, reduced access to public services, and persistent insecurity. As these deleterious effects have become more apparent, so too has the functioning of austerity as a set of policies and practices aimed at deepening and consolidating the discipline of neoliberal capitalism.

This growing clarity – in academia and the public sphere – has led to the tentative emergence of various forms of resistance and alternatives. Mainstream political parties – and even some governments – have gained growing public support from Greece to the UK to Portugal through the adoption of anti-austerity platforms. Traditional trade unions, new social movements, and activists across countries most deeply affected by these new measures have begun to mobilise in new and increasingly combative ways. From mass strikes to everyday acts of refusal, the trend of urban resistance to austerity is growing. To offset the worst of its impact or as a means to overcome the entrenched power and privilege austerity supports, some involved in these resistance(s) have begun to discuss the possibilities of alternatives to austerity – and even to capitalism. How these are manifested and how effectively they can provide tools for thinking about and acting on post-austerity and “post-capitalism”.

It is the aim of our workshop to bring together cross-national comparisons on these themes focused on local urban settings, to explore the similarities and differences in acts of resistance by urban actors, to understand the power and innovativeness of these resistance(s), and to ask how these can offer potential alternative forms of urban governance challenging austerity.

Speakers: Lisa McKenzie (LSE), Phoebe Moore (Middlesex), David Bailey (Birmingham), Saori Shibata (Leiden), Nick Kiersey (Ohio), Lefteris Krestos (Greenwich), Desiree Fields (Sheffield), Lucia Pradella (Kings), Stuart Price, Heather Connolly, Adam Fishwick (DMU)

If you are interested in attending please send an email to Suzanne Walker (swalker@dmu.ac.uk) to register your place.

Workshop on Austerity and Local Economic Development in England: Mapping a Research Agenda

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The Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA) at De Montfort University (Leicester)  is holding a two day workshop on May 16th and 17th 2016 that will bring together leading academics to discuss the future research agenda around local economic development and skills in England.

One of the main pledges of the Coalition Government and its Conservative successor has been to ‘empower’ local communities to develop bespoke initiatives that can drive local economic growth, expand employment opportunities and help address sector and regional imbalances within the UK economy. As part of this ‘new localism’, Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) have been established which bring together local authorities and business leaders to take forward this agenda. Government policy has also placed ‘cities’ and ‘city-regions’ at the core of its approach, brokering a number of ‘City-Deals’. These policy initiatives come at a time of austerity, with substantial cuts to public spending and local authority budgets.

From the outset, LEPs courted controversy, with many commentators highlighting problems of ‘inadequate resources’, ‘uncertain accountability’ and ‘varying capacity’. Since then resources have been stepped up and the dust has now settled sufficiently to permit a fuller assessment. One issue concerns how LEPs might link skills with economic development. For many years, government policy in England has emphasised skills as being central to economic competitiveness, productivity growth and social inclusion. Some commentators, however, argue that narrowly formulated policy interventions aimed at boosting skills supply often fail to address problems of weak employer demand for, and usage of, skills. Indeed, evidence indicates that the UK has serious problems with ‘over-qualification’ and the under-utilisation of skills, which often have a spatial dimension. Skills policies are likely to work better where they are joined up, and integrated within, a wider suite of policies around economic development, business improvement and innovation that impact on employer demand for skill.

If an integrated approach to skills is to emerge locally, then LEPs are a key mechanism. Much is likely to depend on their ability to engage local businesses and mobilise employer action around skills, an area that has proven to be challenging in the past, as well as build constructive partnerships with education and training providers. The hope might be that this approach would not only allow skills provision to be better tailored to local economic needs but would also be able to raise employer ambition around skills by effecting change in competitive strategies and approaches to work organisation, job design and people management. With all actors – LEPs, councils, employers, education and training providers and individuals – facing austerity, there are many challenges as well as questions. Will local actors be given the resources, freedoms and flexibility to deliver on this agenda? Will employers buy into this? Will policy commitments to ‘localism’ and ‘decentralisation’ be hamstrung by cultures of centralisation within Whitehall departments? Is power really being devolved or just responsibility for cuts? Will local actors find spaces for new, innovative and creative approaches that can be extended and built upon? How all of this will play out remains unclear. What is certain, however, is that there is an exciting and important research agenda here for workshop participants to engage with.

Speakers: David Bailey (Aston University), David Beale (Sheffield University), Gill Bentley (University of Birmingham), Crispian Fuller (Cardiff University), John Harrison, (Loughborough University), Martin Jones (Sheffield University), Ewart Keep (Oxford University), Andy Pike (Newcastle University), John Shutt (Leeds Beckett University), John Tomaney (University College London), Chris Warhurst (Warwick University)

If you are interested in attending please send an email to Suzanne Walker (swalker@dmu.ac.uk) to register your place.

CURA’s Launch Conference: some reflections

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Valeria Guarneros-Meza and Adrian Bua report on CURA’s inaugural conference

Last week we held our two day launch conference. Throughout the four panels there were significant discussions that we need to consider in developing our understanding and study of austerity. Many of these ideas were circulated via twitter (@CURA2015) but we think it is worth expanding on 140 character-selling headlines. The points listed below are not exhaustive; they are our impressions of issues that drew people’s attention and therefore worth considering in developing CURA’s future events and research agenda.

Austerity and Urban Boosterism

Urban infrastructures such as Heathrow’s proposed third runway (addressed by papers delivered by David Howarth and Steven Griggs), nuclear plants (Francis Chateauraynaud), HS2 in London (Daniel Durrant) and Medellin’s Teleferico and Reyes de España Library (Kate Maclean) were the examples addressed by the speakers. In the case of London it is striking to see estate development and the type of urban infrastructures mentioned above while the great majority of the city’s population are struggling to make ends meet. In Medellin the concept of ‘social urbanism’ was developed in an era of financial extravagance. Extra spending was targeting national and foreign investment into the city while addressing  basic service needs (access to water and electricity) that marginalised neighbourhoods required. Kate Maclean argued that although the approach had succeeded in attracting investment, upgrading urban space and integrating some marginalised neighbourhoods, urban boosterism has not been enough to tackle levels of crime and violence (measured by homicide rates) in particular pockets of the city. Moreover, it also been argued, in other work by Abello-Colak and Guarneros-Meza, that  the reintegration and disarmament programmes targeting the youth tend to favour those groups that belong to gangs as opposed to building a universal and comprehensive approach to youth development.  In other words, what Medellin’s example is showing is that social urbanism, at its best, or urban boosterism, at its worst, may help the city overcome visible spatial austerity but it will not be enough to tackle the social degradation that austerity of public welfare has caused.

Getting away with it: the socialisation of risk through technical obfuscation

This topic was raised in presentations by Daniel Durrant on HS2 in London and on the political economy of adult social care provision in the UK, by Karel Williams. Daniel’s analysis was based on the balance sheets of the HS2 corporation. He demonstrated that accounts show that cost calculations are based on the benefits for business infrastructure investment and potential business travellers, while wiping out any social costs that are related to the impact that the construction of the railway has on the destruction of community life, schools and other spill overs. Karel’s work on adult social care critiqued the financialisation of care provision by private providers. He argued that optimum returns on property speculation assured by a standardised kind of adult care home (60-80 capacity) with minimum wages and a casualised workforce with high levels of staff turnover. The requirements of quality care provision, and attention to the social and health needs of residents,  takes second place to debt and management strategies that split property ownership on the one hand and home management and operation on the other. These financial innovations provide parent corporations to extract any gain from subsidiaries passing all debt responsibility to the latter; what he called ‘malign performativity’. These two examples show the ability that corporations have in covering and disguising cost-benefit analysis by using sophisticated technicisms that reduce the ability of citizens to understand the model and ability to perceive these techniques as ‘daylight robbery’.

A similar point was made with nuclear plants in France and England (Francis Chateauraynaud), where the scientific and technical discourse of the environmental impact that these generate lead to the production of confusing and competing set of facts and narratives that disempower citizens and politicians (see also Xavier Auyero’s work).

Austerity invites ‘structural violence’

Annette Hastings’ presentation on the socioeconomic costs of local government cuts in England and Scotland argued that they constituted a clear case of ‘structural violence’ – because they put those individuals less able to exercise political agency in harm’s way, and accentuate their marginalisation in public service provision.  Drawing on findings from a recent report, Annette demonstrated the cuts to tax benefits addressing housing and social care have promoted local authorities to change their administrative processes to cope with impacts of the cuts on staff salaries and dismissals.  These practices are structural because they form part of the system that puts order and discipline to the way local authorities are organised and the relationships they build with citizen-users.

The concept of structural violence is relevant to other presentations: such as Robin Smith’s work on the role of ‘street outreach workers’ in tackling with the ambivalent pressures of caring but eradicating  homeless in cities such as Cardiff and New York, where urban boosterism is undoubtedly present as ways of ensuring urban competitiveness; and Robert Ogman’s talk on social impact bonds – another financial innovation that promote structural violence while helping local governments cope with the destabilisation of social and welfare initiatives produced by public fiscal austerity. These three presentations addressed Anglo-American cases, but it is equally interesting to see how structural violence can be found in contexts of crime and physical insecurity in cities in the United States and across different cities in Latin America (see Auyero et al ‘Violence at the Urban Margins’), whose national contexts deepen the complexity of the meaning of structural violence when enmeshed with broader debates on security and urban securitisation.  In cities, both in the north and south, the role of frontline bureaucrats was mentioned as agents caught in the cross road of the ambivalence of everyday governance practice.

Resisting and countering austerity

Both keynotes – Erik Swyngedouw and Karel Williams – addressed the need of agency by academics, insurgent social movements and organic intellectuals to enhance and speed up social innovation in the UK. Erik called for system de-stabilization through insurgency whereas Karel drew upon the concept of social innovation as a potential source of alternatives. These strategies differ in so far as one aims to engender rupture through direct confrontation, and the other pursues an agenda of interstitial change. The modality of the former is agonistic, the latter more collaborative. However, these modalities are by no means mutually exclusive. Paraphrasing Romand Coles critical social theorists should focus on the mutually enabling relationship between agonistic and collaborative forms of participation. Absent agonism, collaboration is in danger of governmentality. This much is evident, we think, in the co-optation and trivialisation of the concept by neoliberalism, resulting in constant innovation without change. On the other hand, absent collaboration, agonistic ruptures can fail to sustain the change that, in Ricardo Blaug’s words, a ‘democratic moment’ opens up opportunity for. In sum, both modalities are necessary to achieve a transformative environment. CURA has a good opportunity to start building on this through its association with the New Economics Foundation (NEF). Rachel Laurence (from the New Economies in Practice team at NEF) and Adrian Bua (NEF and CURA) explained NEF ambitions to sustain and expand activities that make the foundation a hub for research and action that delivers socio-economic change. They also highlighted some areas where CURA and NEF could join forces to shape such an agenda. This could, for example, be around current policies such as devolution and regional economic development. This is also an area which, as Matt Dykes of the Trade Unions Congress explained, is being targeted by organised Labour movements for its potential to create new government tiers that are more amenable to trade union influence. It will be important to bring in other social movements into this agenda also.

It is perhaps it is worth considering how doctoral students can become a generation of organic intellectuals as a strategy to help them find employment that academia seems increasingly incapable to provide. Building professional links between CURA and progressive policy and advocacy organisations such as NEF might be one way to proceed. This could go some way towards breaking down barriers between policy research that seeks political influence, and academic research focussed on making contributions to knowledge.

Valeria Guarneros-Meza is Lecturer in Public Policy at the Deparment of Politics and Public Policy; Adrian Bua is Research Assistant the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity

Investigating the Ethical Turn in Finance: Symposium Report

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On 17 September 2015, a one-day symposium was held in Leicester to discuss the “seeming ‘social’ and ‘ethical’ turn of finance in the context of the global economic crisis”. The symposium was a joint endeavour organised by academics at three universities, including PhD Student at De Montfort University, Robert Ogman, Middlesex University Lecturer in Sociology, Emma Dowling, and Senior Lecturer in Finance and Political Economy at the University of Leicester, David Harvie . Robert Ogman reports back on the day’s proceedings.

One peculiar outcome of the economic crisis and austerity policies of the last few years is the emergence of the “social investment market”. This “seeming ‘social’ and ‘ethical’ turn of finance in the context of the global economic crisis” was the topic of a recent symposium held in Leicester. The gathering was an opportunity to discuss the recent growth of financial products in “responsible” investing, and government efforts to increase private sector involvement in public provisioning, and to offset the resource gap arising from fiscal austerity measures.

Scholars from a host of academic disciplines and from a handful of European countries came to discuss together with practitioners from NGOs and trade unions, the development and implications of these new initiatives, as the programme stated, to “financialise the social”. A central aim was to discuss “the implications for the relationship between state, society, and (financial) markets, and for the users and front-line providers of services.”

Introducing the one-day workshop, the symposium’s co-convenor Emma Dowling, co-author with David Harvie of a recent paper on the nascent social investment market, framed a set of questions that participants were to discuss:

  • What new financial institutions, instruments and practices are being developed? By whom? How do they work? For example: what is the ‘social stock exchange’, what are ‘social investment financial intermediaries’, ‘social impact bonds’ or ‘development impact bonds’? What kinds of social projects are being promoted and developed? (For example, particular concerns include youth unemployment and the urban poor.). The United Kingdom, Australia and the United States along with other G8 member states are at the forefront of social investment, but is this a global phenomenon?
  • What new discourses are emerging to describe an apparent rupture with previous forms of finance, and the concern with making finance ‘work’ for society (as opposed to the other way around)? How have terms such as ‘social value’, ‘shared value’, ‘triple bottom line’ and ‘impact investing’ arisen and what do they seek to describe? To what extent is ‘social finance’ a response to criticisms of the vicissitudes of financial markets in light of the 2008 crisis?
  • More generally, to what extent is social finance a response to a perceived impasse of neoliberal capitalism? Does social finance represent a break with neoliberalism or a deepening and development of it? Will finance’s ‘ethical turn’ address capital’s legitimation crisis? Will social investment provide a source of capital accumulation and profitability? If market and financial logics are further penetrating social life, what are the implications for social relations and social discipline?
  • What is the role of the state in developing social finance and a social investment market? What are the implications for the welfare state, for public service provision and for social policy? Will public-service users – individuals and communities – really benefit? How will front-line providers – both waged and unwaged – be affected? What is the likely impact on civil-society organisations, charities and the third or voluntary sector more generally?
  • Finally, is there any alternative to social investment? How might radical social movements interpret, engage with or challenge and resist the development of social finance? What fault-lines can we detect? Does finance’s ‘social and ethical turn’ signify a point of its vulnerability, the outcome of a legitimacy crisis, and hence a space within which new opportunities may exist to advance critique from a social and ethical perspective?

The first panel opened with a presentation by Dexter Whitfield, from the University of Adelaide, and Director of the European Services Strategy Unit (http://www.european-services-strategy.org.uk/). He focused on a central initiative of “impact investment market”, namely, the increasingly popular policy experiment by the name of “Social Impact Bonds”. He explained the structure and idea of SIBs, and also pointed to a host of weaknesses.

The Social Impact Bond claims to respond to public sector funding gaps (caused by public sector budget cuts) by incentivising private investment in public provisioning. They do so by offering financial rewards to investors when a specific social policy goal is achieved, by an organisation tasked, for example, with reducing prisoner reoffending, homelessness, or the number of children in care. This functions as a public-private partnership, involving a government commissioner which identifies a social policy target, and a non-governmental organisation acting as a project manager, an investor which lends money to a civil society organisation involved in meeting the agreed-upon policy goal. If this organisation hits the set target, so the theory goes, government have reduced expenditures in criminal justice or welfare costs, and these savings will be shared between public authorities and non-governmental investors. The idea is that the government will be “leveraging private capital for public goods”. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007/08, the G8’s Impact Investment Taskforce writes, that “impact investment” will “harness the power of entrepreneurship, innovation and capital for public good”. It is “the invisible heart to guide its invisible hand”.

This theory is being promoted on the national and international levels. As Whitfield writes in his paper, “Alternative to private finance of the welfare state: A Global Analysis of Social Impact Bond, Pay-for-Success and Development Impact Bond Projects”, “there are currently 54 operational social impact bond projects in 13 countries with at least a further 23 at the planning or procurement stage. The UK is the global leader with 32 operational projects with outcome payments valued at £91m, followed by the US with 9 projects.”

Whitfield provided a list of “30 financial and public policy flaws” in SIBs, arguing that, contrary to the purportedly innovative qualities of SIBs, that they are deeply path-dependent, calling them a “mutation of privatisation”. He criticised the increasing role of market ideas and private sector actors in the design, implementation, and evaluation of social and welfare policy, and the further commodification of state welfare functions. SIBs “extend markets and market forces further into the welfare state that could ultimately threaten social rights.”

Going beyond a critique of SIBs, Whitfield also sketched an “alternative vision of public services”, taking up some of the central themes of the SIB policy experiment, such as “early intervention and prevention” and “new public service management”, but placing them in a strongly public framework that limits market forces. This, he argued, would involve the “democratisation of public services”, “social justice and reducing inequalities”, “public ownership and investment”, “progressive taxation”, and “good quality jobs”, which he discusses in his paper.

Turning the focus to an earlier wave of “ethical finance” initiatives, Mareike Beck of the University of Sussex, provided a look at microfinance. Her presentation focused on the supply-side of these trends, looking at the case of German banks in “expanding the provision of ‘poor appropriate’ financial products into the Global South”. She provided a look at the Deutsche Bank in particular. She argued that microfinance cannot be understood simply as a response to the failures of Structural Adjustment Programmes in the 1990s, but also reflect the efforts of these institutional actors to become international investment banks, and of German finance to address legitimacy problems at home.

Claire Parfitt of the University of Sydney contrasted the new wave of “responsible investment” initiatives of the World Economic Forum and the United Nations with earlier, often faith-based, divestment or “ethical investment” campaigns that pressured firms to halt business practices considered to be unacceptable or unethical. She also discussed the role of pension funds within responsible investment portfolios, and the tensions this creates within trade unions by the “worker-investors” who take on “dual subjectivities.”

Norbert Wohlfahrt and Monika Burmester, from the University of Applied Sciences in Bochum, Germany, focused on changes in welfare from provision to “impact”, and from aftercare to preventative care, and the shift from public to private hands, organised around a business model. Their presentation showed how this strategy is connected to the E.U. “human capital” strategy, which, “equates optimal prevention strategies with the active valorisation of labour power as a commodity”. The result is that “the political ideas of supply-side economic and social policy are imposed on social work”.

Allison Roche, of the public services trade union, UNISON, provided a labour perspective of the “social finance” turn. Her comments focused on the growth of social enterprises known as “public mutuals”, which are increasingly taking over the delivery of public services and dismantling the public sector and welfare institutions. She challenged this blending of public and private values in these developments, as well as the informalisation of labour standards as employees shift from the public to private sector.

Robert Ogman’s talk focused on the resonance of “social finance” initiatives, pointing to their success in framing a purported “social neoliberal compromise” in response to austerity’s legitimacy crisis. He argued that SIBs implicitly legitimate the argument of austerity critics by acknowledging social crises. Yet, while they see the funding gap for social provisioning as having to do with a resource imbalance between public and private hands, they reject a redistributive approach, instead pursuing a plan of private investment, which has had mixed results and contains significant risks. SIBs too respond to critics’ objection to neoliberalism that warn of its socially destructive capacity (most recently seen in the financial meltdown of 2007/08). Yet they reject re-regulation, instead calling for the incentivisation of “ethical” investment. Thirdly, SIBs acknowledge the persistent fiscal crises of the state, yet, rather than increasing revenue through progressive taxation, they suggest that governments can replace social expenditures with private capital investment in social provisioning. Hence, SIBs acknowledge a set of arguments advanced by austerity opponents, yet channel these into the expansion of market-centred “public responsibility” initiatives. This is a contradictory process which austerity opponents could intervene in and point out the limits and dangers to, and by doing so, also advance a real paradigm shift.

Additional presentations included: Davide Caselli’s (University of Turin, Italy) paper on the “Financialisation and the Restructuring of the Italian Welfare State”, Marco Andreu from the University of Warwick on “Impact Investing and the Contingency of Market Ethics”, Julian Müller  from the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations on “Harnessing Private Finance for Public Policy Goals”, and Jane Lethbridge (University of Greenwich) on “The Role of the State in Developing Social Finance and a Social Investment Market”. External discussants, Chris Clarke (University of Kent), Donatella Alessandrini, (University of Warwick), Adrienne Roberts  (University of Manchester), and Ekaterina Svetlova (University of Leicester) moderated and provided important outside perspectives to the discussions.

The meeting provided a rare opportunity to present critical perspectives on the emerging paradigm, which is mostly dominated by the think tanks and advocacy groups of the social finance policy network spanning the state, market, and non-governmental organisations.

The session closed with discussions about future research collaborations and public outputs. To contact the organisers, please contact Robert Ogman (robert.ogman@email.dmu.ac.uk).

Robert Ogman is a PhD candidate at the Department of Politics and Public Policy at De Montfort University, as well as a core member our team at CURA