Social Impacts and Their Contracts

Public services and activities delegated to non-profit actors are increasingly subject to evaluation. This practice is not new. Seminal papers document the emergence of such practices in Anglo-Saxon countries in the 1920s. Methods are now converging on measuring the (social) impact, which often involve broadening the spectrum of components evaluated. The flexible and unifying term ‘impact’ is now adopted in public services, education, health and research, as well as in the social economy and finance sectors through impact investing. This is based on extending the spirit of an efficient State, from the expansion of service productivity measures in the 1960s to the expansion of social assessment practices of CSR. To ensure impact measurement, action programmes (both public and private) are now split into a sum of (small) projects whose common denominator is that they are precisely circumscribed to ensure rigorous evaluation. The social impact can be assimilated with a new mode of regulation, the aim of which is to reconcile the requirements of these different actors in evaluative practice, and to almost magically (i.e., by overlooking the intense social work required) align the search for economic efficiency and the pursuit of a social purpose. In this respect, social impact bonds are a heuristic illustration of the trend, bringing together the interests of private funders, public authorities and social economy actors in a single contract, with the ‘evaluator’ playing a decisive role in coordinating this new alliance.