Beyond the Ratio: The Role of Attribution in Strengthening Social Return on Investment (SROI) Measurement

Abstract

In recent decades, social investment has increasingly been recognized as a strategic approach to creating measurable social, economic, and environmental value. One of the most widely adopted approaches for evaluating such impacts is the Social Return on Investment (SROI) framework, which integrates the Theory of Change with monetary valuation to estimate the social value generated by an intervention. However, SROI applications often emphasize the resulting ratio while paying limited attention to attribution, a key component that recognizes the contribution of external actors to observed outcomes. Neglecting attribution may lead to overclaiming and undermine the validity of impact measurement. This study explores the application of SROI to a social investment project in the oil and gas sector, with particular emphasis on identifying and estimating attribution. The findings demonstrate that acknowledging attribution not only influences the resulting SROI ratio but also strengthens the credibility and validity of impact interpretation. These results suggest that the robustness of SROI lies not merely in the magnitude of its ratio, but in its ability to accurately represent the program's contribution to the observed changes.