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Mara Airoldi, Director of the GO Lab, and Nigel Ball, Executive Director of the GO Lab welcome you to the fifth edition of the Social Outcomes Conference 2020.
Many efforts to improve social outcomes involve partnership between a government and civil society or the private sector. That means money changing hands, and that means terms of engagement are needed: a contract.
But social outcomes, in the language of contracts, are 'complex products': they are hard to describe and hard to produce. That can make it hard to agree terms up-front - the parties may need to negotiate continually in the spirit of goodwill. Some contracts are set up for this well - they can be described as 'relational' - while others are not, with sometimes disastrous consequences.
In this keynote, Professor David Van Slyke, Dean of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and a world-famous expert on contracting theory, will offer a framework for understanding this type of contracting, and explore how it might be applied in practice to cross-sector partnerships.
The keynote will be followed by reflections from a stellar panel which includes professors of public administration, law and economics, a non-profit executive and a World Bank Director. They will offer reflections on topics like:
Following David Van Slyke's keynote address the panel will discuss the themes presented and offer their perspectives.
The deep dive and the peer learning sessions are running at the same time, you will have an option to join either. During these sessions the speakers will contribute towards the broader topic in question rather than offer formal presentations. You can view an abstract or summary of their research or practical experience by clicking 'more details'.
Ten years after the first impact bond was launched, there are 82 IBs in the UK, and over 190 across the world. But what have we learned from the past decade? This session brings together a range of perspectives from the UK’s experience, which continues to lead on the development of SIBs. The session will go straight away into the distillation of key lessons. We will ask three key questions:
What has been helpful and should be retained or expanded?
What has been unhelpful and should be abandoned?
What deserves further experimentation?
The Procurement of Government Outcomes (POGO) Club is an open, informal, and passionate mix of academics and practitioners focused on better government contracting for better social outcomes. Since our founding at last year’s conference, we have been pogoing through many salient issues, including emergency changes to government contracts, social value, market engagement, contract management, and corruption. This 2020 roundtable session is in two parts: First, we will reflect upon what the global pandemic means for government procurement. Second, we will co-design our work for the next twelve months. Should we advance strategic public procurement for more resilient social services systems and supply chains? Should we focus on how services users might become more directly involved in public spending and contracting? Action on these and other issues will be defined. Comments and ideas from new voices are welcome.
Please stay in the zoom meeting from the deep dive or peer learning session that you just attended. There will be two groups for online networking that follow on from the concurrent sessions.
The deep dive and the peer learning sessions are running at the same time, you will have an option to join either. During these sessions the speakers will contribute towards the broader topic in question rather than offer formal presentations. You can view an abstract or summary of their research or practical experience by clicking 'more details'.
Over 190 impact bond projects have been launched to date in 30 countries across the world. Places as diverse as Japan, Russia, Germany and France have adopted and adapted the model first pioneered in the UK to tackle a growing range of social issues. What are the drivers that are fuelling the adoption of impact bonds in such different jurisdictions? How is this approach understood and used by policymakers and practitioners in different social and economic contexts to address specific challenges? What are the shared opportunities but also the system-level barriers that are shaping the way in which impact bonds are being implemented in new geographies?
This session will draw on the insights of experienced practitioners and researchers from six different countries to explore these issues and what they mean for the development of outcomes-focused public services around the world.
There is a rich pedigree of efforts to increase collaboration between organisations and to work across whole ‘systems’ in the pursuit of improved social outcomes. Such efforts are sometimes set in contrast with more ‘linear’ approaches, where a single organisation running a clearly defined ‘intervention’ aims to improve social outcomes through a pre-determined causal chain or ‘logic model’. Both approaches can claim evidence-based legitimacy, and they need not necessarily contradict. Nonetheless, they potentially call for quite different approaches to measuring social outcomes, both in terms of motive – why measurement might be useful – and means – how it might be done.
Measurement can be useful to help those providing services to continually adapt delivery to respond to ongoing learning. It can also help to demonstrate that resources have been well spent in pursuit of outcomes. Yet in collaborative, system-level delivery environments, these learning and accountability purposes can conflict. Starting with the UK experience and moving on to look at experiences in Poland, Australia, and Italy, we will aim to draw out pragmatic insights on how these tensions might be reconciled.
Please stay in the zoom meeting from the deep dive or peer learning session that you just attended. There will be two groups for online networking that follow on from the concurrent sessions.
In this session we will explore efforts to catalyse the broader adoption of outcomes-based partnerships, particularly through the use of ‘outcomes funds’. We will consider how those responsible for developing and nurturing the ecosystem of outcome-based partnerships and impact bonds have responded to the Covid-19 emergency. We will look at whether and how approaches have been adapted and how practitioners are seeking to use outcomes-based approaches to respond to the crisis and support social and economic recovery.
The deep dive and the peer learning sessions are running at the same time, you will have an option to join either. During these sessions the speakers will contribute towards the broader topic in question rather than offer formal presentations. You can view an abstract or summary of their research or practical experience by clicking 'more details'.
Outcome contracts or ‘payment by results’ have been used for decades in training and employment support services to incentivise service provider organisations to focus on the achievement of job outcomes. Service flexibility is allied to promises of innovation and performance improvement but there are well known risks around ‘cherry picking’, ‘creaming’ and ‘parking’ of people who are intended to receive support services. This session brings together the latest academic research with practical insights on the shifting design and implementation of outcome contracts in employment support.
This session features five presentations related to COVID-19 response and recovery in projects, partnerships, policies, and countries. Four overarching questions guide these contributions:
Data standardisation and data-driven reform efforts in the public, not-for-profit, and impact investing spaces have brought the importance of ‘measuring impact’ to the fore, but how embedded is that information in decisions that improve results? In this session, panellists will discuss the links between data and decision-making, distilling important managerial, organisational, and contextual considerations for those using data to pursue social outcomes.
The deep dive and the peer learning sessions are running at the same time, you will have an option to join either. During these sessions the speakers will contribute towards the broader topic in question rather than offer formal presentations. You can view an abstract or summary of their research or practical experience by clicking 'more details'.
In this session we will explore risk transfer and innovation in SIBs and how responses to Covid-19 challenge our understanding of these issues. We will discuss whether outcomes-based contracting furthers innovation; in particular we will consider whether OBC allowed for more innovative responses to the Covid-19 crisis than other forms of contracting. Moreover, we will explore the financial risk allocation in SIBs and potential changes in risk allocation in light of Covid-19.
The International Network for Data on Impact and Government Outcomes (INDIGO) is a new initiative supported by the GO Lab. While our primary audience is public sector policymakers, exciting data initiatives are underway in other sectors. Collaboration and iteration are key. In the first part of this session, the GO Lab will launch a process for sharing data on impact bonds and prototype tools to describe the role of a social investor or fund manager. We will also discuss potentially complementary initiatives such as the UNDP’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Impact Standards initiative and work by the IMP+ACT Alliance around social investment portfolio classification. In the second part of this session, we will see and hear about outputs from the INDIGO Hack-and-Learn. Learn more about INDIGO here.
The deep dive and the peer learning sessions are running at the same time, you will have an option to join either. During these sessions the speakers will contribute towards the broader topic in question rather than offer formal presentations. You can view an abstract or summary of their research or practical experience by clicking 'more details'.
This panel will discuss and assess ‘the SIB effect’, i.e. the influence of this contracting and funding model on social outcomes when compared to alternative approaches to funding social programmes. Much of the early evaluation work on Impact Bonds focused on the effect of the intervention rather than the extra efficacy or efficiency (if any) added by the particular SIB contracting strategy. This session brings together practical tools for identifying the results orientation of projects alongside the latest academic research which formally assesses the contribution that the SIB model has made to the observed social impact.
Throughout this conference we will hear of incredible efforts to reach the most vulnerable in our societies. Yet as academics and practitioners we may find ourselves far removed from the lived reality of the people we are seeking to help. One approach to close the gap between programming and the needs of service users is to incorporate ‘user voice’ in service design and delivery.
Bringing ‘user voice’ to the front of our minds this session explores the following questions:
Please stay in the zoom meeting from the deep dive or peer learning session that you just attended. There will be two groups for online networking that follow on from the concurrent sessions.
In healthcare, pricing health outcomes and using these prices to design financial incentives for market players is becoming mainstream in many countries. The arguments around ‘value based pricing’ to price pharmaceuticals is the clearest example. In social care, however, similar practices have attracted much debate and controversy about the financialisation and commoditisation of vulnerable populations. Is the debate on pricing social outcomes simply lagging behind and is there anything that can be imported by the healthcare experience? Or are the two domains fundamentally different? Or is healthcare underestimating potential pitfalls of their practices?
In the past decade, more and more voices across the globe have been calling for a recalibration of the ‘social contract’. The Covid-19 crisis has only amplified these. This is not just about the relationship between state and citizens, but also about the changing role that businesses, voluntary organisations, social enterprises, and philanthropic organisations might play alongside government in building thriving communities. The impetus for shifting power closer to people and places, and for more cross-sector partnerships, may be obvious. What is less clear is how these relationships can work effectively in practice.
In this session, two world leading thinkers – Sir Paul Collier and Alnoor Ebrahim - will draw on their decades-long work to explore these themes, offer pragmatic solutions and examples of best practice, and share their own vision for how to build and nurture inclusive communities, where no one is left behind.
The discussion will be moderated by Mara Airoldi, Director of the Government Outcomes Lab at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government.
This public talk is hosted by the Government Outcomes Lab, as part of the fifth edition of the Social Outcomes Conference.
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