A Comparative Analysis of Social Impact Bond and Conventional Financing Approaches to Health Service Commissioning in England: The Case of Social Prescribing

We compare two social prescribing interventions in Northern England. One was financed through a Social Impact Bond (SIB) and the other was financed in a more conventional way. We utilise a comparative approach to understand the extent to which different approaches to financing social prescribing conform to key features of the New Public Management (NPM) or New Public Governance (NPG) in their design and implementation. We find that a SIB approach tends towards NPM during programme design and implementation and that this creates challenges for social prescribing programmes, the complexity of which appear better suited to an NPG-based relational approach.