Power Dynamics in Transformative Social Innovation

Description du projet

Les relations de pouvoir dans les processus d’innovation sociale transformatrice

Les innovations sociales (IS) représentent des approches permettant de relever des défis sociétaux grâce à de nouvelles méthodes, perspectives et structures organisationnelles. Pour contribuer à la transformation de la société, les IS doivent remettre en question, modifier ou remplacer les structures et institutions dominantes qui sous-tendent ces défis. Toutefois, à mesure que les IS se diffusent ou s’étendent, elles peuvent perdre leur impact transformateur. Le projet POTRANSI, financé par le CER, étudie comment la dynamique du pouvoir évolue au cours des processus d’innovation sociale transformatrice (IST) et comment les IS peuvent gagner en pouvoir tout en préservant leur potentiel de transformation. Le projet développera un cadre permettant d’analyser la manière dont les acteurs issus de différents contextes institutionnels gagnent, perdent, exercent ou sont soumis au pouvoir dans le cadre des processus des IST. Il s’agit de mener des études de cas approfondies sur quatre tendances de l’innovation sociale à différentes échelles et de concevoir une méthodologie appelée «Moments de pouvoir critiques» pour l’analyse rétrospective.

Objectif

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.