Abstract
Climate neutrality is an urgent and complex challenge that cannot be solved with technological solutions alone but requires a systemic approach. Social innovation is a key lever of change in socio-technical transformations: promoting social innovation at urban level can empower communities in shaping sustainable behaviour and collective action to tackle climate change. To promote and scale social innovation at urban level for reaching climate neutrality, politicians and policymakers need to be aware of effective practices that can be implemented that match a city’s readiness level. With the aim to develop a framework to support public administrations and policymakers in making informed decisions to support social innovation for sustainability, we triangulated the academic literature on social innovation for climate neutrality with over forty case studies to derive categories, which have been further refined, based on experts’ opinions and feedback. The resulting, theoretically based and practically relevant, social innovation actionable pathways to climate neutrality are composed of ten categories: (1) Public administration capacity building in social innovation; (2) Social Innovation task force and strategy making (3) Funding for Social Innovation initiatives; (4) Citizens' capacity building; (5) City Social Innovation mapping; (6) Co-creation platforms and environments; (7) Social innovation policies; (8) Incubating and accelerating social innovations, (9) Co-creation and cross-sector partnerships, and (10) Systemic innovation approaches which include social innovation. For each category, related literature and case studies are provided.
Keywords
Sustainable social innovation; sustainable behavioural change; social innovation ecosystems; scaling social innovation
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.403
Citation
Bresciani, S., Tjahja, C., Komatsu, T.,and Rizzo, F.(2023) Social innovation for climate neutrality in cities: actionable pathways for policymakers, in De Sainz Molestina, D., Galluzzo, L., Rizzo, F., Spallazzo, D. (eds.), IASDR 2023: Life-Changing Design, 9-13 October, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.403
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
fullpapers
Included in
Social innovation for climate neutrality in cities: actionable pathways for policymakers
Climate neutrality is an urgent and complex challenge that cannot be solved with technological solutions alone but requires a systemic approach. Social innovation is a key lever of change in socio-technical transformations: promoting social innovation at urban level can empower communities in shaping sustainable behaviour and collective action to tackle climate change. To promote and scale social innovation at urban level for reaching climate neutrality, politicians and policymakers need to be aware of effective practices that can be implemented that match a city’s readiness level. With the aim to develop a framework to support public administrations and policymakers in making informed decisions to support social innovation for sustainability, we triangulated the academic literature on social innovation for climate neutrality with over forty case studies to derive categories, which have been further refined, based on experts’ opinions and feedback. The resulting, theoretically based and practically relevant, social innovation actionable pathways to climate neutrality are composed of ten categories: (1) Public administration capacity building in social innovation; (2) Social Innovation task force and strategy making (3) Funding for Social Innovation initiatives; (4) Citizens' capacity building; (5) City Social Innovation mapping; (6) Co-creation platforms and environments; (7) Social innovation policies; (8) Incubating and accelerating social innovations, (9) Co-creation and cross-sector partnerships, and (10) Systemic innovation approaches which include social innovation. For each category, related literature and case studies are provided.