Van Slyke's work cited in new U.S. Government Accountability Office report
In its recent
report, “PAY FOR SUCCESS: Collaboration among
Federal Agencies Would Be Helpful as Governments Explore New Financing
Mechanisms” the GAO uses Van Slyke’s and co-authors
Trevor Brown’s and Matthew Potoski’s work, Complex Contracting: Government
Purchasing in the Wake of the U.S. Coast Guard’s Deepwater Program
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), as the basis for its
analytical framework and recommendations for how OMB and, more broadly, federal
agencies should approach, design, manage, and oversee their use in a broad
range of public programs.
The GAO
report explains, “Pay for Success (PFS), also known as Social Impact Bonds, is
a contracting mechanism to fund prevention programs, where investors provide
capital to implement a social service— for example, to reduce recidivism by
former prisoners. If the service provider achieves agreed upon outcomes, the
government pays the investor, usually with a rate of return based on savings
from decreased use of more costly remedial services, such as incarceration.”
Van Slyke is
an associate dean and chair of the department of public administration and
international affairs at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship
and Public Affairs, holds the Louis A. Bantle Chair in Business and Government
Policy and is a two-time recipient of the Maxwell School’s Birkhead-Burkhead Teaching
Excellence Award. 09/10/15