Speakers
Description
Social innovation has long been hailed for its potential to tackle urgent social and economic challenges, particularly in academic and policy circles. It is seen as a means of enhancing local welfare by generating public goods and services while promoting collective empowerment. From a planning perspective, social innovation is viewed as a transformative tool capable of reshaping social relations and altering power dynamics within communities. However, critical literature has raised concerns about its over-romanticisation and the rhetoric of governance-beyond-the-state, particularly regarding the notion that social innovation could justify the state's retreat from addressing systemic issues such as exclusion, deprivation, and inequality. Additionally, critiques highlight the uneven distribution of social innovation initiatives and their potential to exacerbate existing disparities.
While it is widely acknowledged that local communities alone cannot resolve entrenched societal issues, a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between social innovation and institutions - particularly in urban planning - is still lacking.
Emerging research underscores that public support is critical to the sustainability of social innovation and its ability to scale beyond micro-level interventions. This contribution focuses on the relationship between social innovation initiatives and local institutions, exploring how both “learn” from one another to improve public action and urban planning practices. On one hand, we investigate how civic initiatives develop competencies and awareness through their interactions with institutions. On the other hand, we explore how institutions, conceived as evolving learning bodies, gain insights through engagement with social innovation initiatives. The Veneto Region, particularly the city of Verona, serves as the field of observation for this study. This region has a long-standing tradition of faith-based civic action and a robust associative fabric. Verona shares this tradition with the wider region, but in the past ten years, the Municipality has become more directly involved in collaborative management of common goods - alongside other Italian cities. Based on a mapping of existing civic initiatives that address emerging and unmet needs, this research examines their relationship with local institutions, particularly the municipal government, and investigates the learning processes triggered by these interactions, both for the social innovation initiatives and for local institutions.
First, in-depth interviews with key local actors and policymakers reveal the spatial, social, and institutional factors shaping their relationships. For instance, the municipality’s efforts toward social innovation and horizontal subsidiarity create a generative space for exchange. However, it is essential to critically assess which types of initiatives (and needs) the Municipality is capable of addressing, and to what extent it can foster processes of learning and awareness. The role of other actors, such as private foundations and universities, also emerges as critical in this dynamic. Secondly, institutional ethnography conducted within the Municipality of Verona further explores the learning process within local institutions. This analysis examines political cultures, competencies, organizational structures, methods, tools, procedures, and dynamics to identify elements that facilitate institutional learning and transformation in response to social innovation initiatives and, more broadly, evolving societal needs. Through these research activities and findings, the paper highlights the critical role of the relationship between social innovation and institutions—beyond just civic action initiatives—in addressing contemporary crises and evolving societal needs, while proposing a dynamic definition of social innovation, particularly within the context of urban planning.
This contribution is part of the broader research project RESISTING – Reconnecting Social Innovation with Institutions in Urban Planning, funded under the National Research Program of National Interest (PRIN NRRP 2022), within Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan. RESISTING studies three different Italian regional contexts.
| Keywords | social innovation; institutional learning; Veneto Region |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
