Guide for Public Administrations – Guidelines for Tendering Social Impact Contracts (SIC)

UpSocial publishes the guide for public administrations – Guidelines for Tendering Social Impact Contracts (SIC), a resource for designing, tendering, and implementing SICs as public procurement mechanisms aimed at innovation, prevention, and evidence-based accountability.

The document, developed with the support of the Juan Entrecanales de Azcárate Foundation, offers theoretical and practical guidance for integrating results-based payment logic and multi-stakeholder collaboration into public procurement processes.

The guide is one of the outcomes of the systematisation of learnings from the first workshop on Social Impact Contracts for public administrations, held in Madrid on October 14, 2025. The session addressed the model’s alignment with Spain’s Public Sector Contracts Law (LCSP), the design of verifiable metrics, success-based payment structures, shared governance, and independent evaluation.

Content

• Conceptual framework of Social Impact Contracts as instruments to finance outcomes, not activities.
• A three-phase roadmap (strategy, tendering, and implementation) for their deployment.
• Recommendations and good practices to leverage regulatory flexibility, build partnerships, and strengthen evidence-based evaluation.
• Reference case: “Málaga No Caduca” (Málaga Provincial Council, 2024), the first SIC tendered in Spain, as a foundation for scaling the model.

Relevance

Social Impact Contracts are a public procurement mechanism to foster innovation and prioritise prevention over reactive responses. They focus spending on verifiable results, align incentives among stakeholders, proportionally transfer implementation risks, and strengthen independent evaluation as a decision-making foundation—promoting more efficient, collaborative, and evidence-based public contracting.

Date: October 2025

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