Analysing social innovation through the lens of poverty reduction: five key factors

Abstract

Social innovation Poverty Poverty reduction Structural analysis Research design In the last decades social innovation has attracted much research attention, with a variety of projects studying how social needs are approached in innovative ways. However social innovation is rarely analysed through an understanding of the specific social problem they react to. This article develops an analytical framework to study social innovations in relation to structural poverty reduction. After explaining the underlying theory on poverty, it described five key factors and twelve sub-factors to be taken into account for the design of research on social innovation in the field of poverty. This includes: the relation to the structural production of poverty; the relation to the position of people in poverty; the relation to solidarity and political conditions; the diffusion, scale and continuation and finally the relation to government and existing poverty programs.

Resisting social innovation: the case of neighborhood health centers in Belgium

“…Although every so often windows of opportunity emerge for small spurts in diffusion, the point is that there has never been a coordinated effort to spread this SI. This further adds to the insight that social innovations in general, but especially innovations in the field of poverty reduction, do not scale or spread based on inherent merits (Ghys, 2018). A more strategic approach is required for SI to structurally contribute to tackling societal problems.…”

“…To show this dynamic at work, we presented the case of neighborhood health centers in Flanders, Belgium. Although virtually all individual NHCs have proven sustainable and the concept was being widely endorsed by social organizations, this SI has known a particularly slow diffusion in Flanders, both compared with NHCs elsewhere and with other SI of similar age in Flanders (Ghys, 2018). Building on previous research, we assessed that this SI had a limited but real potential to contribute to poverty reduction, through de-commodifying first line healthcare and improving the access to further help within a territorial approach.…”

“…The data was collected using a specific framework to analyze the relation of SI to structural poverty reduction (Ghys, 2018). This analytical framework consisted of five key factors, further split into twelve sub-factors and over thirty points of attention for data collection and coding.…”

“…This article will shift the focus to the role of interest groups that resist social innovations with potential to reduce poverty, drawing more attention to power relations in SI processes (Hölsgens, 2016). We will discuss power relations in the context of structural poverty reduction (Ghys, 2018), using the case study of Neighborhood Health Centers in Belgium 11 .…”

" Bizilagun Sarea: La Sistematización de Redes en el Programa Etorkizuna Eraikiz"

“…En definitiva, a medida que la complejidad de los retos ha aumentado en términos cuantitativos y cualitativos, la capacidad de los Estados de Bienestar para dar una respuesta efectiva se ha ido reduciendo, hasta el punto de que cada vez más, se habla de la necesidad del aumento de las "colaboraciones de bienestar" (Salamon y Toepler, 2015), para la articulación de sistemas efectivos de bienestar. La crisis parece haber generado una nueva estructura de oportunidad política para la actuación de la sociedad civil organizada (Zubero, 2015:32), y están surgiendo con fuerza los paradigmas de la innovación social (Ghys, 2017), los bienes comunes (Mattei, 2013;Hess y Ostrom, 2016), o el capital social (Putnam, 2000), planteando posibles alternativas desde esferas no siempre institucionales.…”