Can Social Innovation Make a Change in European and Mediterranean Marginalized Areas? Social Innovation Impact Assessment in Agriculture, Fisheries, Forestry, and Rural Development

Abstract

Social innovation (SI) impacts are long-term changes that affect different dimensions of territorial capital (i.e., economy, society, environment, governance) for the territory in which SI occurs. Yet, systematic empirical evidence and theoretically sound assessments of the impacts of SI are scarce. This paper aims to fill the gap and assess the different aspects of SI’s impacts in European and Mediterranean areas that are characterized by marginalization processes. To assess the impacts of SI in marginalized areas, we use the evaluation framework developed within the Social Innovation in Marginalized Rural Areas (SIMRA) Horizon 2020 project and apply it to nine SI initiatives related to the fields of agriculture, fisheries, forestry, and rural development. Our findings show that SI produces cross-sectoral (societal, economic, environmental, and governmental) and multi-level impacts (on individuals, community, and society), which have improved the societal well-being, and contributed to the reduction of certain forms of marginality, mainly inside the territory in which SI occurred.

What Are the Impacts of Social Innovation? A Synthetic Review and Case Study of Community Forestry in the Scottish Highlands

“…Our results highlight that the impact of the SI initiative is mostly local and close to the local actors both physically, structurally, and in terms of scale of governance. This aligns with results obtained in different European countries [7].…”

“…As the results have shown, the resources available to the community to develop their initiative were limited (staff and volunteer time, skills, and network) and prioritised to meet local needs. Those results are in line with the current literature [7]. That being said, it was too early to assess some of the impacts in the environmental dimension such as, for example, the potential impact of increased diversity of the woodland on creating ecological corridors enabling animal species migration at the landscape level.…”

“…This provides further context for encouraging the development of visions by local communities for their rural areas. SI has been shown to be an effective process for enacting such visions, triggered by the need to tackle challenges facing societies and stimulating territorial development in different biophysical and socio-economic contexts [7].…”

Impacts of Social Innovation on Spatiality in Mountain–Lowland Relationships — Trajectories of Two Swiss Regional Initiatives in the Context of New Policy Regimes

“…For our question-the evaluation of long-term impacts and territorial trajectories in two single cases-the qualitative approach was more promising as it necessarily needs context knowledge which cannot be provided by standardized questionnaires. In contrary, the quantitative tools are useful to measure and compare (short-term) outcomes or to compare a larger number of cases (the quantifiable results are published elsewhere, e.g., [1,54,55], and in the detailed Lumnezia and Neuchâtel/Val de Travers reports [52,53]). Our question was not how and which services in the mountain area are specifically stabilised or expanded; also, it was of less importance whether their position in intranational competition of rural areas could be improved.…”

“…Various disciplines from sociology to business administration are now dealing with it, so it is necessary to narrow down this umbrella term and define it for each issue. A helpful attempt at delimitation is the division of SI into "process, outcomes and impacts" [1]. A further specification enables us to distinguish between adaptive and transformative SI; the former could be characterised as performance-related, the latter as a deeper change in institutional regimes, or-applied to questions of regional development-as changes in spatiality.…”