Project description
Power relations in transformative social innovation processes
Social innovations (SIs) represent approaches to addressing societal challenges through new methods, perspectives, and organisational structures. To contribute to societal transformation, SIs need to challenge, modify, or replace the prevailing structures and institutions that underlie these challenges. However, as SIs diffuse or expand, they may lose their transformative impact. The ERC-funded POTRANSI project examines how power dynamics shift during transformative social innovation (TSI) processes and how SIs can gain power while preserving their transformative potential. The project will develop a framework to analyse how actors from different institutional backgrounds gain, lose, wield, or are subjected to power within TSI processes. It involves conducting in-depth case studies of four trends in social innovation across various scales and designing a methodology called Critical Power Moments for retrospective analysis.
Objective
Initiatives around the world are addressiInitiatives around the world are addressing societal challenges by experimenting with social innovations (SI), i.e. new ways of doing, thinking and organising. Examples include sharing economy, eco-communities, participatory democracy and many more. Such SIs can contribute to societal transformation if/when they challenge, alter and/or replace dominant structures and institutions that underly the root causes of societal challenges. To have such a transformative impact, SIs must undergo some form of diffusion, scaling or mainstreaming. In this process, they lose (some of) their novelty and risk reproducing or even aggravating the structures/problems that they meant to challenge in the first place, thereby possibly contradicting their original intentions. This project tackles this innovation paradox from a power perspective by studying how power relations are changed and/or reproduced in processes of transformative social innovation (TSI) and asking how/to what extent SIs are/can be mainstreamed and gain power while upholding transformative potential. We develop a novel power framework that synthesises major power contestations in social and political theory to analyse how actors across different institutional logics (state, market, community, non-profit) gain/lose/exercise/undergo power in TSI. We conduct embedded case studies of 4 SI-trends (sharing economy, eco-communities, decentralised energy, and participatory democracy) at multiple scales, including 12 translocal networks and 12 local initiatives in 3 geographical contexts (United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Portugal), using interviews, participant observation, document reviews and Transformative Power Arena sessions. We design a Critical Power Moments methodology for retrospective analysis of how power relations are (re)produced/transformed over time, as well as a prospective participatory Transformative Power-tool to identify challenges and strategies for powering TSIs.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
3584 CS Utrecht
Netherlands