The social and environmental failure of successive Western development models imposed on the global South has led local communities to pursue alternatives to development. Such alternatives seek radical societal transformations that require the production of new knowledge, practices, technologies, and institutions that are effective to achieve more just and sustainable societies. We may think of such a production as innovation driven by social movements, organizations, collectives, indigenous peoples, and local communities. Innovation that is driven by such grassroots groups has been theorized in the academic literature as “grassroots innovation”. However, research on alternatives to development has rarely examined innovation using grassroots innovation as an analytical framework. Here, we assess how grassroots innovation may contribute to building alternatives to development using Zapatismo in Chiapas (Mexico) as a case study. We focus on grassroots innovation in autonomous Zapatista education because this alternative to formal education plays a vital role in knowledge generation and the production of new social practices within Zapatista communities, which underpin the radical societal transformation being built by Zapatismo. We reviewed the academic literature on grassroots innovation as well as gray literature and audiovisual media on Zapatismo and autonomous Zapatista education. We also conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a Zapatista community and its school. We found innovative educational, pedagogical, and teaching–learning practices based on the (re)production of knowledge and learning, which are not limited to the classroom but linked to all the activities of Zapatistas. Our findings suggest that innovation self-realized by Zapatistas plays a key role on the everyday construction of Zapatismo. Therefore, we argue that a specific theoretical framework of grassroots innovation for the pluriverse, based on empirical work carried out in different alternatives to development, is an urgent task that will contribute to a better understanding of how such alternatives grassroots groups imagine, design, and build, particularly across the global South.

Alternatives to development represent fairer forms of social, economic, and political organization, including environmental sustainability criteria as well. Many new outcomes are created during the design and everyday construction of alternatives to development (e.g., knowledge, practices, social relations, institutions). We may think, therefore, that innovation plays a key role in how such alternatives are imagined and materialized. However, the literature on alternatives to development does not appear to have focused much on innovation. In addition, there is academic literature on innovation that has coined and developed the concept of “grassroots innovation” to refer to innovation realized by grassroots groups. Yet, this literature does not seem to have focused on alternatives to development as innovation-rich spaces. Based on these observations, our objective in this paper is to analyze the potential role of grassroots innovation in alternatives to development, especially in contexts of the global South. To this end, we conducted a literature review along three axes: (1) grassroots innovation; (2) post-development and alternatives to development; and (3) Zapatism, an alternative to development in Mexico (in the last two axes we looked for direct or indirect references to grassroots innovation). Our results confirmed the previous observations. Nevertheless, we identified multiple and diverse innovative outcomes in the literature on post-development, alternatives to development and Zapatism, and altogether our findings suggest a very important role for grassroots innovation in these alternatives. Based on our review, we have provided a preliminary characterization of how grassroots innovations may look like and occur in alternatives to development (particularly in contexts of the global South). We emphasize the need to develop a theoretical-conceptual framework on grassroots innovation from the global South to improve its explanatory power given the diversity of existing alternatives to development. In addition, we call for more empirical studies that focus on identifying grassroots innovations and assessing their relevance to the design and everyday construction of alternatives to development.

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