Institutionalization processes in transformative social innovation : capture dynamics in social solidarity economy and in basic income initiatives

This chapter explores the governance of Transformative Social Innnovations (TSIs) and focuses specifically on the challenges that emerge during institutionalization processes. The authors highlight the tensions that occur when TSIs are interacting with insitutions that they want to transform, often in a radical way. The perspectives of TSI actors and how they anticipate, avoid, refuse, welcome, or acept  the governance intentions of TSI initiative and the netorks advanced by public and market autorities are examined. Utlimately the authors consider the question of what to think about alternative practices at the micro-level as experiments shedding useful light on hetrodox macroeconomic perspectives for social change. In the chapter the authors see that a key quetion for TSI governance is how to manage vulnerability. They discuss the 'grey zone' between transformative social innovation and captured social innovation and how these two contrasting processes interact and interlink during the institutionalization proceses. Apart from a theoretical consideration of capture dynamics in the TSI institutionalization process in the wider literature on transition governance, the chapter explores the dynamics of capture and transformation in two TSI international networks, namely the Réseau Intercontinental de Promotion de l'Economie Sociale et Solidaire (International Network for the Promition of Social Solidarity Economy) generally known by it French acronym RIPESS and the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). The chapter ends by drawing the wider implications for TSI governance based on these two case studies. [Adapted from Authors' introduction to the chapter].

Citation

Bauler, T., Pel, B. and Backhaus, J. (2017) Institutionalization processes in Transformative Social Innovation : capture dynamics in social economy and in basic income initiatives, In: Cohen, M., Brown, H. S. and Vergragt, P. J. (eds.) (2017) Social change and the coming of post-consumer society : theoretical adnvances and policy implications, Abingdon, Routledge, pp. 78-94.