There is something deeply uncomfortable about seeing a dollar sign placed next to whānau hauora. That tension sits at the centre of current discussions about Social Return on Investment (SROI) and the wider social value agenda in Aotearoa. These approaches offer a language that funders, ministers, and policy officials readily recognise. At the same time, they can risk narrowing value to what can be measured, monetised, and translated into policy and investment logic.
Māori communities and the organisations that serve them have long struggled against a kind of ‘value invisibility’. While the benefits of investing in whānau-centred support, early intervention, kaupapa Māori primary care, and culturally located services are well documented, too often they are undervalued because they do not fit easily within dominant economic framings.
If SROI helps make that work more visible and helps secure investment that might not otherwise reach Māori, then it has a practical use. Used carefully, SROI can be a strategic translation tool. It can help demonstrate that Māori-led approaches are not only the right thing to do, but also generate wider benefits across health, education, justice, and social wellbeing. In a system that appears to respond most readily to numbers, ratios, and cost offsets, that matters.
At the same time, SROI is not neutral. Like all methodologies, it is shaped by particular assumptions and traditions, and its foundations are firmly Western. It tends to privilege a particular view of value, one that is individualised, monetised, and tied to assumptions about what counts as a cost, what counts as a benefit, and whose perspective defines both. That is where the discomfort begins. Mana motuhake is not simply a future economic gain. Cultural connection, reo revitalisation, whakapapa relationships, dignity, belonging, and the restoration of identity do not sit neatly inside a monetisation model, and many would argue nor should they.
Yet these are precisely the actions, relationships, and experiences that sit at the transformative core of kaupapa Māori support. Relationships built through aroha, manaaki, whanaungatanga, and long-term trust are not incidental to outcomes, they are the source of them. A service delivered in this way is fundamentally different from one that is transactional, deficit-framed, or culturally unsafe. Any approach to measuring value that does not recognise what is uniquely Māori about the pathway to change risks undervaluing the integrity of that journey.
This is where the methodological tension sits. SROI has a place, but it cannot be allowed to define the whole story. At its best, it can serve as one tool within a wider evaluative approach, helping to articulate value in ways that decision makers recognise while remaining anchored in Māori ways of understanding wellbeing. That means it should sit alongside kaupapa Māori evaluation frameworks, under Māori authority, rather than above them. It should inform the conversation, not determine what counts.
There are encouraging signs that thinking in Aotearoa is beginning to move in this direction. Recent work has acknowledged that conventional health economic evaluation does not adequately capture forms of value that are collective, relational, cultural, and intergenerational. It points toward more expansive approaches, including Māori wellbeing indicators, broader evaluative frameworks, and genuine co-design over what outcomes matter and how they are assessed. The question now is whether the system is prepared to move beyond recognising the limitation and take seriously the work of evaluating value differently.
The challenge for us is to make sure our stories of value lead the method, not the other way around. Because the measure of a good life is not how much it saves the Crown. It is whether people can live with dignity, connection, identity, and the full expression of who they are.
Dr Catherine Leonard (Ngāi Tahu) is the Research Director of Ihi Research, where she leads kaupapa grounded research and evaluation focused on social impact and systems change. Beginning her career as a psychologist working alongside children and whānau on the East Coast, she later spent a decade as a senior lecturer at Victoria University and completed her Doctorate in Education at Massey University. Catherine has also held leadership roles, including Chief Executive of Te Tapuae o Rehua, a subsidiary of Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu. Her work centres on qualitative methodologies and partnering with grassroots communities to evidence meaningful change, supported by an extensive academic background in education, psychology, and applied management.
