Alchemy vs Chemistry: Does Innovative Finance Really Bring in New Money?
Innovative finance schemes are most likely to fail if the main aim is to bring in more money, and most likely to succeed if the aim is to create new ways of working.
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Innovative finance schemes are most likely to fail if the main aim is to bring in more money, and most likely to succeed if the aim is to create new ways of working.
How NGOs and service delivery organisations can be empowered by better use of data to improve public service delivery.
Some thoughts-in-progress: if you are going to provide a public subsidy to the private sector, is it nearly always better to amplify the returns than to reduce their risks?
The World Bank President Jim Kim has said that the next frontier for the World Bank is to 'help to advance a science of delivery'. But the problem is not that we are ignoring politics, as Kevin Watkins suggests: the problem is that we are ignoring complexity.
In the last of a series of three blog posts looking at the implications of complexity theory for development, Owen Barder and Ben Ramalingam look at the implications of complexity for the trend towards results-based management in development cooperation. They argue that is a common mistake to see a contradiction between recognising complexity and focusing on results: on the contrary, complexity provides a powerful reason for pursuing the results agenda, but it has to be done in ways which reflect the context. In the 2012 Kapuscinski lecture Owen argued that economic and political systems can best be thought of as complex adaptive systems, and that development should be understood as an emergent property of those systems. As explained in detail in Ben’s forthcoming book, these interactive systems are made up of adaptive actors, whose actions are a self-organised search for fitness on a shifting landscape. Systems like this undergo change in dynamic, non-linear ways; characterised by explosive surprises and tipping points as well as periods of relative stability. If development arises from the interactions of a dynamic and unpredictable system, you might draw the conclusion that it makes no sense to try to assess or measure the results of particular development interventions. That would be the wrong conclusion to reach. While the complexity of development implies a different way of thinking about evaluation, accountability and results, it also means that the ‘results agenda’ is more important than ever.
Last week, the New York Times’ Tina Rosenberg wrote about Social Impact Bonds – a new and promising approach to investing in improved social outcomes.
This is a joint post with Rita Perakis
Last week, CGD and Social Finance launched a new high-level Working Group to consider Development Impact Bonds, a new mechanism to enable private investment in development outcomes. Owen Barder and Rita Perakis explain.
There is nothing new about the idea that development assistance is an investment: spending money today in the hope of future benefits. Putting money into immunizing kids or giving them an education is an excellent investment in the future well-being of those people. But if there are financial returns they are often far in the future and cannot be directly linked back to the investment. For many development investments the returns are mainly social, not financial. And the absence of financial returns on a reasonable timescale could be why there is no market for investing in development. There is a small pool of investors who are willing to be paid in good karma; but most would rather be paid in dollars, sterling or euros.
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