The Post: Beyond the petty politics, can social investment actually succeed?

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One of the last Labour government’s strategic missteps was to basically mothball Bill English’s social investment approach.

The approach, in its ideal form, uses data to identify early interventions that could help struggling individuals – then puts families and communities in charge of how those programmes are delivered. The aim is to shift funds from under-performing schemes to better ones, tackle deep-seated social problems, and save the state money in the long run.

Sounds hard to dislike, or so you might think. Yet many on the left have a knee-jerk reaction against it.

Partly this is because social investment is a National Party creation. Partly this is because, in its first iteration under politicians like Paula Bennett, it became an excuse for kicking people off benefits as quickly as possible. And partly this is because its proponents are probably over-optimistic about how much “data” can tell us and how precisely we can ever determine whether something “works”.

Nonetheless, Labour’s decision to put social investment into suspended animation was the policy-wonk version of petty politics. But then so too was National’s decision to – in turn – scrap Jacinda Ardern’s “well-being” approach.

Despite what their respective partisans might say, the two approaches are broadly aligned. Both attempt to see individuals and families holistically, understanding that they need to flourish on multiple fronts (“domains”, in the jargon) if they are to be truly well.

Both seek to more rigorously evaluate which public schemes will support that flourishing. Both attempt to move beyond GDP as the predominant metric of success.

The petty alternation of “social investment” and “well-being” has, in short, only obstructed our collective attempt to establish how the state can more effectively spend its multi-billion-dollar social budget. Matters haven’t been helped by the furore surrounding Andrew Coster and his forced resignation as the first head of the rebooted Social Investment Agency.

Nonetheless the agency’s work ploughs on – and might even endure a change of government, whenever that occurs. While the left hasn’t fully reconciled itself to social investment, many Labour MPs at least grudgingly accept its worth. One told me they think the left “just has to do social investment better” than National does it.

What that might look like is an intriguing question. Last week I shared a stage at the New Zealand Economics Forum with Graham Scott, the head of the advisory Social Investment Board, and Rachel Enosa, who runs The Cause Collective, one of the new agencies that will commission services in the family-centric Whānau Ora scheme.

In his remarks, Scott put less emphasis on data and evaluation, and more stress on the desperate need to improve the way government delivers services to communities. Too often, the experience of people on the ground, especially in the regions, is of government agencies acting in a high-handed manner, failing to talk to each other, and delivering the services that they have predetermined families need rather than the ones those whānau might value most.

The Social Investment Agency is, instead, exploring something called community commissioning, which aims to allow local groups to come together and put in bids for pools of money that can be spent in much more flexible, community-driven ways. While not entirely without fishhooks, it’s a promising approach, one that’s consistent with Whānau Ora and potentially congenial to the left.

If there’s a problem with social investment, it’s probably the narrowness with which some view it. In my own remarks to the forum, I highlighted the ground-breaking but hugely challenging research of an American economist, Megan Stevenson, whose work assesses the latest evidence on criminal justice schemes, covering everything from employment programmes for ex-offenders through to bootcamps.

Almost nothing works, Stevenson concludes: fewer than one-quarter of US schemes can boast even one positive assessment, and those that do generally prove impossible to replicate outside their initial context. Stevenson thinks the underlying problem is the search for the “cascade”: the cheap but sensationally effective programme that, by fixing one part of a person’s situation, sets off a chain of improvements that forever alters their life course.

These “cascades” are “mostly a myth”, Stevenson writes, because struggling individuals are invariably embedded in dysfunctional social contexts, living in neighbourhoods weighed down by poverty, racism, poor health and limited opportunities for work. Until those “negative stabilisers” are addressed, any small-scale state initiative is liable to be overwhelmed.

Nor is this conclusion surprising when we consider our own national history. The initiatives that really changed lives in the 19th and 20th centuries, lifting lifespans and well-being in a broad-based manner, were the big, sweeping, universal or quasi-universal state schemes: free education, free hospital care, the social welfare safety net.

Such schemes are, of course, a form of “social investment”; I’m told the Scandinavians have long used the term to describe precisely these big-picture programmes. But is our own version of social investment capacious enough to reflect this reality? That’s the multi-billion-dollar question.