Transformative social innovation is understood as a change in social relations, involving new ways of doing, organising, and knowing, and challenging, altering or replacing existing institutions (Haxeltine et al. 2015, building on Franz et al. 2012, Moulaert et al. 2013). There is a strong tendency in public discourse to associate social innovation with initiatives by ‘civil society’, ‘the community’, ‘social entrepreneurship’, and/or ‘the Third Sector’. The Third Sector is seen as an ‘intermediary’ sector, “a place where politics can be democratised, active citizenship strengthened, the public sphere reinvigorated and welfare programs suited to pluralist needs designed and delivered” (Brown et al 2000:57). Individual actors (e.g. ‘social entrepreneurs’ and ‘institutional entrepreneurs’), intermediary organisations, and transnational networks, act as crucial nodes at this intersection between market, government and community; they translate, spread and connect social innovations across different sectors and localities.
In order to unpack how different actors and sectors are involved in social innovation, this paper proposes a so-called Multi-Actor Perspective on transformative social innovation. Building on the Welfare Mix model in Third Sector studies (Evers & Laville 2004, Pestoff 1992), the Multi-Actor Perspective distinguishes between four ‘institutional logics’ - state, market, community, third sector - and between actors at different levels of aggregation: 1) sectors, 2) organisational actors, and 3) individual actors (Avelino & Wittmayer 2015). At the level of sectors, the distinction is based on general characteristics and ‘logics’ (i.e. formal vs. informal, for-profit vs. non-profit, public vs. private). While sectors themselves can be viewed as ‘actors’, they can also be seen as specific ‘institutional contexts’ or ‘discursive fields’ in which collective/organisational or individual actors operate and with which they interact. These sectors are not fixed entities: rather, the boundaries are contested, blurring, shifting and permeable, and they provide sites of struggle and/or cooperation between different actors.
These shifting relations between and within sectors, and the redefinitions of the boundaries between different institutional logics, can be considered as a manifestation of transformative social innovation in themselves (Nicholls & Murdoch 2012; Pel & Bauler 2015). Such shifting relations and contested boundaries inherently come with power struggles and processes of (dis)empowerment, which is why these are particularly pertinent topics when studying social innovation. This paper employs the Multi-actor Perspective to conceptualise how power relations between sectors and actors are shaped and contested in processes of transformative social innovation. Empirically, the paper builds on a comparison of three case-studies of social innovation initiatives that represent different institutional logics: (1) the Impact Hub network of social entrepreneurs (mostly market-oriented), (2) the international phenomena of Participatory Budgeting (mostly state-oriented) and (3) the global Ecovillage Movement (mostly community oriented). The Multi-actor Perspective is applied to demonstrate how social relations change in each of these cases, how they challenge existing institutions and institutional boundaries, and what are the power struggles involved.
References
Avelino, F. & Wittmayer, J. (2014/ forthcoming) “Shifting Power Relations in Sustainability Transitions: A Multi-actor Perspective”, paper presented at the Pressure Cooker: Role of Civil Society in Sustainability Transitions, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, November 21, 2014. Accepted for publication in the Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning
Brown, S. L. (2002), “Community as Cultural Critique”. In: dies. (ed.) Intentional Community: An Anthropological Perspective. p 153-179. Albany: State University of New York Press
Evers, A., & Laville, J. L. (Eds.) (2004) The Third Sector in Europe. Edward Elgar Publishing
Haxeltine, A., Kemp, R., Dumitru, A., Avelino, F., Pel, B. and J. Wittmayer (2015) A first prototype of TSI theory. TRANSIT Deliverable 3.2, TRANSIT: EU SSH.2013.3.2-1 Grant agreement no: 613169.
Moulaert, F., MacCallum, D., Mehmood, A. and A. Hamdouch (eds.) (2013) The international handbook on social innovation: collective action, social learning and transdisciplinary research. Cheltenham/Northampton: Edward Elgar.
Franz, H. W., Hochgerner, J., & Howaldt, J. (2012). Challenge Social Innovation: Potentials for Business, Social Entrepreneurship, Welfare and Civil Society. Springer.
Moulaert, F. (Ed.). (2013). The international handbook on social innovation: collective action, social learning and transdisciplinary research. Edward Elgar Publishing.
G. Mulgan, S. Tucker, A. Rushanara, B. Sanders, Social innovation: What it is, why it matters and how it can be accelerated, Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship (2007)
Nicholls & Murdock (2012). The nature of social innovation. Social innovation. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 1-30.
Pel, B. & Bauler, T., (2015), Governing Transformative Social Innovation: Capture dynamics in the Social Solidarity Economy, 2nd Interdisciplinary Symposium on Sustainable Development; How to accelerate the transition? 20-22 May 2015, Bruxelles/Louvain-la-Neuve
Pestoff, V. (1992) “Third Sector and Co-Operative Services – An Alternative to Privatization”, Journal of Consumer Policy, 15:21-45
6. Institutionalization, scaling up and public policies
