Social return on investments: economic, financial and sustainable aspects

We analyse the Social Return On Investment (SROI) as a form of evaluation that contributes to a wider analysis of public investments. SROI offers an overview of how change has been generated and experienced by beneficiaries and stakeholders. The method uses monetary values to represent the social and economic results of investments infrastructure investments, by calculating the impact created for each euro invested in the project and expressing this impact in the form of a ratio. However, the emphasis is more on creating economic and environmental sustainable values than on the financial aspect. Nevertheless SROI is designed to stimulate funding by private as well as public entities We argue that the synthesis provided by SROI can be an useful tool in order to evaluate and give impetus to Pay for success (PFS) and Social impact bonds (SIBs) in modern social and environmental programming.