This paper examines the recent phenomenon of social impact bonds (SIBs). Social impact bonds are an attempt to marketize/financialize certain contemporary, intractable "social problems", such as homelessness and criminal recidivism. SIBs rely on a vast array of accounting technologies including budgets, future cash flows, discounting, performance measurement and auditing. As such, they represent a potentially powerful and problematic use of accounting to enact government policy. This paper contains a case study of the most recent in a series of SIBs, the London Homelessness SIB, focusing on St Mungo's, a London-based charitable foundation that was one of two service providers (charities) funded by the SIB. The case study is intended to enable a critical reflection on the rationalities that underpin the SIB. For this purpose, the paper draws upon Michel Foucault's work on biopolitics and neoliberalism. The SIB is thoroughly neoliberal in that it is constructed upon an assumption that there is no such thing as a social problem, only individuals who fail. The SIB transforms all participants in the bond, except perhaps the homeless themselves, into entrepreneurs. The homeless are instead "failed entrepreneurs" who become securitised into the potential future cash flows of investors.

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Based on a micro-level study of microfinance, this paper explores how basic accounting technologies and interpersonal accountability are used to make lending to poor village women profitable and low risk. We argue that "microaccountability," our term for the structuring and formalization of convivial relationships into a capillary system of accountability, must be recognized as a central tool of social governance under neoliberalism. Our field research in Sri Lanka allows us to analyse how microaccountability is employed by for-profit banks to create from poor villagers a legion of bankable individual entrepreneurs, trained to invigilate each other's savings and credit behaviours. Using the theoretical lens of biopolitics, we show how microaccountability enables the extension of the finance industry into untapped sectors of the global population.

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