People-Centered Social Innovation

Global Perspectives on an Emerging Paradigm

Swati Banerjee, Stephen Carney, Lars Hulgard, Swati Banerjee, Stephen Carney, Lars Hulgard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351121002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Social Innovation is emerging as an alternate interdisciplinary development pathway of knowledge and practice that aims to understand and address contemporary complexities and multi – dimensional social realities. BEPA (2011) defines social innovation as, 'innovations that are social in both their ends and means'. However, though Social Innovation is a widely-used term; its conceptual understanding and the specific relation to social change remains under explored.

People Centered Social Innovation: Global perspectives on an Emerging Paradigm attempts to revisit and extend the existing understanding of Social Innovation in practice by focusing upon the lived realities of marginalized groups and communities. The emerging field of people-centered development is placed in dialogue with theory and concepts from the more established field of social innovation to create a new approach; one that adopts a global perspective, engaging with very different experiences of marginality across the global north and south. Theoretically, 'People Centered Social Innovation: Global Perspectives on an Emerging Paradigm' draws upon 'northern' understandings of change and improvement as well as 'southern' theory concerns for epistemological diversity and meaning making. The result is an experiment aimed at reimagining research and practice that seriously needs to center the actor in processes of social transformation.

1 People-Centered Social Innovation: An Emerging Paradigm with Global Potential

Swati Banerjee, Stephen Carney and Lars Hulgård

Introduction

On the dusty plains of Andhra Pradesh, Madhavayya found his father’s limp body in the small hut where he would rest from the midday sun. Scorched by debt and despair and at the mercy of both harsh weather and fickle markets, Mallappa took his own life rather than continue what seemed like an endless struggle for moderate prosperity on his own land. His story—one shared by hundreds of thousands of struggling farmers across India—only made global headlines because Mallappa had planned his funeral in advance. After purchasing the white cloth that would cover his body, as well as garlands, incense and a laminated photo for his grave, he left a final note to his family that explained that he had made these preparations in order to ease their burden during the hard days ahead. A good farmer who had planned the use of his land with care, Mallappa had no control of the price of his crops, access to markets or the conditions for financing short-term hardships. Indeed, these factors appeared to work actively against him. Madhavayya has now left his father’s land, joining a growing exodus of young people to India’s mega-cities in search of a different future but equally dependent on circumstance and the small favors of global capitalism.

In another case, this time closer to our own work in rural India, a group of poor and marginalized women explained their desire to create a small-scale livestock farming project. Like Mallappa, their aim was to create a livelihood that might provide a degree of autonomy, security and social justice. Their ultimate goal, however, was something else: to enable their children to obtain a level of education that would free them from the struggles of rural existence and open the way for a different type of future in the metropolis. For one farmer, the aim may be to live securely in the familiar surrounds of home. For another, it is the prospect of transcending that: to leave and never return. While examples from the global South seem somehow extreme or more urgent, the experience of hardship, despair, desire and human initiative is global. Such experiences frame capitalism wherever it takes form. How, then, can we understand and act with respect for such perspectives while holding firmly to our commitments to change unjust structures at their roots, help others in egalitarian ways and make a fairer world?

The contested concept of “development” is about change and some understanding of progress or improvement, but the distinctive contribution of the approach we outline in this book—a people-entered approach to Social Innovation—suggests that such change must take as its starting point the ontological, social and political perspectives of those it aims to support. Following the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2016), our starting point is an acknowledgment that “the understanding of the world by far exceeds the Western understanding of the world”. Additionally, there can be “no global social justice without global cognitive justice’ and that ‘emancipatory transformations in the world” might well “follow grammars and scripts other than those developed by Western-centric critical theory” (p. viii). This radical perspective requires an equally radical and courageous reassessment of the role and potential of academic work at what many acknowledge to be a turning or tipping point in the history of humanity. For change to be meaningful, something meaningful has to change in the way we approach the world.

Making a Difference in an Age of Ideas

Our time is definitely complex and increasingly marked by the clash and conflict of interests and policies. Growing social and economic inequality and the concentration of wealth marks our time as dangerous and unstable. Some claim that the unfolding 21st century may be the most unequal period ever faced by humanity (Piketty, 2013). In spite of their active engagement in developing and maintaining societal inequality, individuals of extreme wealth and the foundations that carry their names and message have successfully created a headline-grabbing policy agenda. Here, we see a small fraction of the profits of such work used to set the agenda for social innovation globally. With marvelous linguistic innovation, we are offered the promise of “catalytic philanthropy”, “corporate social innovation”, “social impact investment” and, for example, “scaling for impact”. Such word craft rarely stands alone from the heroic individuals it celebrates. Ashoka, a leading body promoting social entrepreneurship gives British business tycoon Richard Branson its seal of approval. With a long history of for-profit entrepreneurship packaged as socially aware and alternative, Branson’s metamorphous from businessman to determined social innovator was complete after his cameo appearance in Al Gore’s groundbreaking documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Responding to Gore’s home visit where he was given a personal PowerPoint presentation, Branson remarked that it was “one of the best presentations I have ever seen in my life … As I sat there and listened to Gore, I saw that we are looking at Armageddon” (Klein, 2014: 231). On the spot, Branson gave a pledge to turn his Virgin Group into Gaia Capitalism, a notion he invented that would redefine and celebrate the earth as a single living organism. Following this pledge, he publicly announced a commitment to spend US$3 billion to develop biofuels as an alternative to oil and gas. Thus spoke the social entrepreneur, innovator, savior and collective conscience of the planet. One man, one voice, one vision, all based on a privileged right to speak and act.

On the surface, such passion and vision seem a service to the majority of the population but avoids another “inconvenient truth” that collective challenges are best met by political consensus and the establishment of common resource pools through systems of taxation and the shared sense of ownership and obligation they engender. While the charismatic change agent offers a new perspective and can possibly break an impasse in public policy making, other perspectives are closed down or obscured. Some social activists have noted that while committed wealthy individuals have a role to play, they and their corporate connections are able to extend their wealth as the spotlight of change shifts from the state, its democratic institutions and the people who, ultimately, have most at stake. What happened to Richard Branson’s pledge? According to Naomi Klein, the investment in biofuel was well under $300 million in 2014 only two years before the $3 billion target was to be reached in 2016. By 2018, some environmental lobby groups had claimed that less than 3% of the original commitment had been honored.¹ Klein ends her analysis of Branson as a change maker for the common good by indicating that the skeptics may be right. “Branson’s various climate adventures may indeed prove to have all been a spectacle, a Virgin production, with everyone’s favorite bearded billionaire playing the part of planetary savior to build his brand, land on late night TV, fend off regulators, and feel good about doing bad” (Klein, 2014: 251).

Rather than solely a critique of certain strategically motivated individuals, we may be seeing the beginning of a new phase in the political process where media, charismatic leadership and our collective desperation to find solutions make us especially vulnerable to the image, slogan and unsubstantiated promise. Clearly, it appears that powerful business tycoons such as Richard Branson and, for that matter, policy makers, do not need to implement their ideas in order to be celebrated as successful and passionate change makers. In the airline industry, Branson needed planes in the air to achieve his success as a tycoon. In social innovation, he only needed to outline his vision in the broadest of strokes. When business leaders enter the field of social innovation, they often do so with exaggerated goals that are a large part of a strategy for recognition. Pamela Hartigan of the Skoll and Schwab Foundations, one of the most influential discourse makers in the world of social innovation, once noted “that a social entrepreneur is what you get when you cross Richard Branson with Mother Teresa” (World Economic Forum, 2003). Just by entering the field with ideas and visions, the global social innovator reaches the goal of having an impact. He becomes a change maker for the common good.

Following the legacy of Joseph Schumpeter, it was assumed that innovation and social innovation had to be implemented in order to be successful. This capacity for implementation distinguished an inventor from an innovator. Here, the practical development of new products or procedures had to take place: while the ability to envision something entirely new was a precondition, actual change had to be achieved. This need not necessarily take the form of a new service or product but could also emerge as changed societal power relations driven by social movements. However, in contemporary times, it seems that business leaders, in particular, can become successful social innovators by simply launching an idea aimed at seducing people and policy makers to open their hearts, minds and funds. Top-down, energetic, authoritative, connected but, nonetheless, distant from any lived understanding of the challenges faced by marginalized groups. Supported by a short-term media cycle and an emerging political culture where message outruns action, our genuine and collective impulse for socially oriented change is in danger of being transformed into understandings of the world and strategies for engaging with it that will only intensify the damaging pathologies of the previous century.

Using rhetoric to ride the wave of interest in social innovation may serve the ends of those select superrich and their network of corporate partners but stops the vast majority of human beings from contributing to immense societal challenges that range from demographic and climate change, rising inequality, xenophobia and a contemporary political disorder marked by a populism. In some countries, typically in the global North, these changes appear to have a lesser impact but, even here, we see a kind of permanent crises of consciousness, particularly amongst the young who face precarious futures and a failing political system. As such, to advocate for social innovation is to also advocate for a people-centered perspective: one where strategies of change are first envisaged in dialogue with those who stand most to lose but, by the same token, have most to offer.

Approaching People-Centered Social Innovation

A people-centered approach to social innovation rests on a number of important assumptions. First, social innovation was never a question of how to use the capitalist firm or the conventional market model as a blueprint for serving the needs of people. The dominance of a market-centered approach to social innovation is, in fact, quite recent. Neither innovation or, for that matter, social innovation can be thought of as originating from the market economy (Moulaert et al., 2017; Godin, 2015). Indeed, the origins of the concept of innovation precede those of social innovation by many centuries (Moulaert et al., 2017) and are grounded in two characteristics: “the quest for freedom” and a prioritizing of practice over “contemplation” (Godin, 2015: 6). In its earliest iterations, innovation can be located in Western religious texts in the 15th century (Moulaert et al., 2017) but has more ancient roots in 5th-century-BCE Greece. Here, innovation stems from the word kainos (new). Initially, kainotomia had nothing to do with our current or dominant meaning of innovation as commercialized technical invention. Instead, innovation meant “cutting fresh into” and was used in the context of concrete thinking (“opening new mines”) as well as abstract thought (“making new”): “In the hands of ancient philosophers and writers on political constitutions, innovation is introducing change into the established order” (Godin, 2015: 19). Benoit highlights an additional feature of innovation that is crucial for the people-centered approach articulated here. Innovation was initially envisaged as “subversive” and inherently political, “it is regulated by Kings, forbidden by law and punished. Books of manners and sermons urge people not to meddle with innovation” (Godin, 2015: 22). Innovation was also understood as reflecting diverse struggles for freedom. As such, we can say that social innovation has been concerned historically with issues of emancipation and self-determination: an inherently political concept today dramatically emptied of its original meaning and potential. Since the quest for freedom and emancipation lies the core of any activity labelled as innovation, one may wonder if there is even a need to develop theory about social innovation, especially for any understanding that positions people at the center of the change process.

Second, the people-centered approach to social innovation adopted in this volume takes an important point of departure in Karl Polanyi’s understanding of economic activity which, he warned, could never be reduced to the virtues of markets:

Let us make our meaning more precise. No society could, naturally, live for any length of time unless it possessed an economy of some sort; but previously to our time no economy has ever existed that, even in principle, was controlled by markets. In spite of the chorus of academic incantations so persistent in the nineteenth century, gain and profit made on exchange never before played an important part in human economy. Though the institution of the market was fairly common since the later Stone Age, its role was no more than incidental to economic life.

(Polanyi, 1957: 43)

Polanyi made a distinction between a formal and a substantive view of the economy. Economy, in the formal sense, is about economizing scarce resources, whereas

the latter centers on how human beings organize and allocate the pursuit of the things needed to sustain human life, humans are social animals; they define and realize themselves in relation to others. It is collectively through social arrangements that human beings work out how they will secure their livelihood.

(Block and Somers, 2014: 30)

Economic activity is as much about actions shaped by changing configurations of redistributive and reciprocal actions as of the actions of a market. To Polanyi, “robust human freedom depends on a coalition of state and civil society that has the power to protect society against the destructive forces of marketization” (Block and Somers, 2014: 4). This perspective lives on in the claims of influential economists such as Nobel Prize recipient Joseph Stiglitz who has reiterated the need for social innovations that can address the inequalities produced by conventional market economies. To Stiglitz (2011), “[t]he problem is that the growth that has been achieved may not be sustainable and the benefits of the growth that has occurred are accruing to but a fraction of the population”. As such, “social innovations are as important as technological innovations” and the lessons from recent economic crises are moral as well as a structural.

This moral dimension is emphasized when he argues that the same people who brought the global community to the abyss due to their greed were, in the wake of the economic crisis, allowed to walk away with much more than they deserved by successfully managing to externalize the full costs of their actions. In structural terms, he adds that the growth produced by the conventional market economy is neither sustainable nor able to benefit the majority of society (Stiglitz, 2011). Inequality is on the rise everywhere, also in countries that used to be pioneers in reducing inequality and income differentials. No one doubts that we are blessed with talented social innovators and policy makers but if we are to build and reinforce policy conditions and ecosystems of social innovation that fundamentally challenge the view of the market as a driver of social innovation, people have to find their way to the center of change processes.

The third foundation for a people-centered approach to social innovation lies in a commitment to promoting what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls “ecologies of knowledge” (Santos, 2016) to challenge the monocentric approach that has led us to the precipice of irreversible inequality and environmental devastation. An approach that identifies ecologies of knowledge would recognize material differences and injustices and make visible alternative worldviews, values and epistemologies. In research terms, it requires that we go beyond classical paradigms of Western and Northern thought in order to engage with other equally valid knowledge(s). This commitment is fundamental to a people-centered approach to social innovation as it creates not only new spaces for discussing the meaning of progress and innovation but also for inviting otherwise silenced voices into conversations about our common future.

Some “Southern knowledge” perspectives view modernity itself as a European phenomenon constituted dialectically “with a non-European alterity that is its ultimate content” (Dussel, 1993: 65–66). Here, the global South is defined not on its own terms but by its difference from the supposed norms and ideals of the global North. For de Sousa Santos, “Northern” thinking is “abyssal” because it operates in a space that relies upon “non-existence, invisibility, nondialetical absence” (Santos, 2016: ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 People-Centered Social Innovation: An Emerging Paradigm with Global Potential
• 2 Social Innovation Learning From Critical Social Entrepreneurship Studies: How Are They Critical, and Why Do We Need Them?
• 3 Arenas for Gendering Social Innovation and Marginalized Women’s Collectives
• 4 Genealogy and Institutionalization of People-Centered Social Innovation in Kudumbashree, Kerala, India
• 5 Ethos of Social Innovation: In Search of a Decolonizing Analysis
• 6 Informal Entrepreneurship as Adaptive Innovation: Strategies Among Migrant Workers in Indian Cities
• 7 Buen Vivir as an Innovative Development Model
• 8 Indian Diasporic Communities: Exploring Belonging, Marginality and Transnationalism
• 9 Innovations in Multistakeholder Partnerships for Sustainable Development: Fostering State–University–Community Nexus
• 10 Social Innovation in Africa: An Empirical and Conceptual Analysis
• 11 Social Innovations as Heretical Practices
• Notes on the Authors
• Index