The ambitions and activities of social housing providers in the UK today extend beyond those associated with the traditional landlord role. Providers are now aiming to address a range of complex and cross-cutting social issues to improve individual and community wellbeing. A recent advance in practice to support this broader service delivery has been the development and adoption of tools and approaches to measure the social value generated by such activities. This thesis aims to understand, firstly, the contextual drivers for the recent growth of this practice in the sector; and secondly, the most significant dynamics for successful implementation, from both the operational perspective of the individual organisation and the strategic perspective of the wider social housing sector. This is approached through qualitative interviews with programme architects and leading practitioners, drawing on a conceptual framework that combines a programme theory approach (realist evaluation) with an implementation theory formation (Theory of Change), within the analytic framework provided by the ‘public value’ paradigm. The thesis concludes by specifying a model for the\ud
implementation of social impact measurement, which looks beyond the individual methods for impact measurement to assess the wider contextual factors and the specific inner workings of the complete process (including the\ud
necessary organisational capabilities) that are required to successfully implement and embed the practice. This then provides a number of insights into the developments needed at an organisational and sector-wide level to\ud
fulfil the positive outcomes anticipated from social impact measurement