Social Investment: A New Zealand Policy Experiment , Jonathan Boston and Derek Gill (eds) (2018)
By Alessandra De Marco The notion of prioritising ‘productive’ social investments over ‘consumptive’ social spending has long been advocated but only sporadically applied. Since 2011, however, New Zealand governments have implemented an ambitious, multi-agency social investment agenda that promises to overhaul public social spending through analyses of citizen-derived data. This commentary focuses on the development and features of the social investment agenda. In doing so, it discusses the apparent primacy of fiscal outcomes over social outcomes, and the practices and...