Subject: [WSF-Discuss] On the bias: 'social innovation' discourse is skewed to maintaining the status quo
REMKO
BERKHOUT 29 December 2014
Irresistibly
biased? The blind spots of social innovation
Social
innovation has an irresistible global appeal, but is it biased towards
protecting the status quo?
What's the state of play in the fast paced world of social
innovation?
The Unusual
Suspects Festival in London seemed a good place to find out.
Collaboration was the theme. The claims made were high. The stakes may
be even higher. A dazzling line up of initiatives were on display,
backed up by discussions and debates on everything from the future of
public services to the role of the arts in social change to the
game-changing potential of social entrepreneurs.
Social innovation has an irresistible global appeal. Who wouldn't be
persuaded by the challenge of mobilizing all our skills, energies and
creativity to solve the world's toughest problems? Students are
increasingly pursuing social innovation as a career path. The UK
government is championing it as a key strategy in the 'Big
Society.'
Initiatives like
Shared Lives Plus in healthcare, Code Club in education, and the return of community
organizing at
Locality were
among hundreds of exciting examples showcased at the
Festival.
Thanks to the work of the Social Innovation Exchange, the impact of such projects
travels to places as far apart as South Korea and Argentina, where
innovators are working on similar grand challenges. Innovation is also
fast becoming the mainstream in the international development
community, with leading donor agencies like Britain's Department for
International Development, USAID and the Omidyar Network throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at
innovations linked to poverty, humanitarian disasters and government
transparency.
But perhaps this buzz disguises some important biases that undermine
the power of social innovation, at least if it aims to transform the
systems and structures that perpetuate poverty and inequality. I
came away from the Festival with four of these biases swirling around
my brain: a bias towards co-optation instead of genuine collaboration;
'bigger is always better;' 'solving problems' is more urgent
than building the capacity to find solutions; and a serial avoidance
of politics.
According to management guru Peter Senge, collaboration is the human face of systems
change.
Addressing the most pressing global challenges demands collective
action on an unprecedented scale across all sectors of life. We need
more 'public-private partnerships' and 'multi-stakeholder
initiatives.'
But let's not forget that systemic change is impossible without
contestation. Challenging dominant ideas and debating alternatives in
the public sphere is a key source of creative tension. "Having a
good fight before getting to yes" is essential to building
compromises and constituencies, as the sociologist Xavier de Souza
Briggs
concludes in his book 'Democracy as Problem Solving." Protecting
spaces for 'unruly politics' and the exercise of strong countervailing
power is vital for societal renewal.
So it's highly problematic to hear Brooks Newmark, Britain's "Minister for
Civil Society," say that social organizations should "stick to their
knitting and keep out of politics" at a meeting that announced the dawn of a
"people-helping-people age." Just get on with your work,
pay your taxes (so that government can bail out more banks), and
don't expect the state to bail out ordinary people.
Instead, here's some money and the odd award for you to 'innovate'
your way to helping people deal with a collapsing economy and a social
safety net that's disappearing. And so the social innovation
community gets busy devising ingenious volunteering schemes in
hospitals and facilitating communities to re-organize their depleted
assets. Is this collaboration or co-optation?
The second bias is
scale. "You are playing too small," declared the
writer
Charles Leadbeater to a roomful of social innovators at a discussion
of 'Making It
Big,' a report
issued by the UK agency NESTA. The report proposes some helpful steps to scale up
social innovations, but omits to acknowledge that bigger is not always
better. On the contrary, the desire to 'make things big' is what
has caused many of our toughest problems to emerge or expand in the
first place. If there's one thing to learn from systems thinking,
it's that the smallest of gestures can make the biggest difference
and vice versa.
The problem with the scaling-up debate is that it's dominated by
management science and its focus on market development and
organizational theory. Developments in the social realm rarely conform
to such dynamics. Nor do they fit into to the timeframes and 'value
for money' metrics of success that funders and policymakers tend to
apply. For example, studies of social movements show that their real
impact lies through changing the climate of ideas or expanding the range of policy
alternatives. The timeframes of these processes are generational, not
annual, and their effects are usually difficult to control or
predict.
As an illustration, take the Austrian town of Graz where I live. In Graz I've
discovered a lively ecosystem of activists and social entrepreneurs
who are 'moving and shaking' public life through everything
from
co-working schemes to projects for urban renewal and alternative street
festivals. A
good many of them went to same alternative secondary school which was
set up in the 1970s by parents who wanted to change the system through
concrete
'pre-figurative' alternatives.
By the social innovation standards of today, they failed. The school
is still small and struggling, and the education system they set out
to shake up is as stuck in its ways as it was 40 years ago. Yet
haphazardly perhaps, it has produced a generation of change makers
that are now at the forefront of creating innovations, big and small,
across many areas of social and economic life.
What these activists also have in common is that they don't worry
excessively about problem solving, a third social innovation bias that
plays out unproductively in at least two ways. First there's the
myth of "solutionism", a term coined by Evgeny Morozov to describe the global
obsession with 'fixing our world,' preferably with technological
solutions or band aids while ignoring the deeper dynamics of the
problem. Second, problem solving only taps into a small part of the
reservoirs of human creativity and civic energy. To paraphrase the
futurist
Buckminster Fuller, people should be architects of their future, not
slaves.
The upshot of these biases is an over-arching denial of politics and
power. My impression from the Unusual Suspects Festival was that
little deep digging is happening in the social innovation world to get
at the underlying factors that perpetuate inequality and plunder the
planet. Popular tunes among innovators include grand statements about
'broken systems' and 'unprecedented crises' which demand that
we 'hack' or 'reboot' our world. And then off we go,
co-creating and experimenting our way to a bright emergent
future.
Coupled with energy, urgency is a contagious mix, but perhaps it would
be useful to take an extra minute and ask some basic questions about
what is going on: who benefits from the status quo, and who will
benefit from any social innovation? Which problems rise to the top and
which are ignored in competitions, policy papers and social innovation
funding?
To illustrate these questions, take the example of Alberta's one billion
dollar Social Innovation Endowment, which was also featured at the Unusual
Suspects Festival. According to its own press release, this new "monster
fund"
puts Alberta's "growing savings" to work in "resolving complex
social issues like poverty or family violenceŠ[by using] new
thinking, new approaches, and risk-taking that can be more effectively
implemented outside of traditional government
approaches."
Big money, big words, but if these ambitions are genuine then a
substantial part of the endowment should be invested in the deeper
structures that give life and oxygen to society, like an education
system that promotes life-long learning, or deepening democracy,
strengthening gender equality and protecting
biodiversity.
In addition, where
do these 'growing savings' come from? The answer is
royalties from one of the dirtiest forms of energy in the world. You would
expect at least a mention of the controversial Alberta Tar
Sands
and the
Keystone Pipeline in the Endowment's strategy-probably the most
important reality that frames the questions of who gains and who loses
from social innovation in the province.
It's none too
soon for the social innovation community to throw away their rose
tinted glasses. As for the next festival of unusual suspects in London
or wherever, how about a focus on politics for a change? Now that
really would be a social innovation.
********
Remko
Berkhout works as a consultant and facilitator with civic
organizations on strategy, learning and innovation. He is exploring
the fertile middle ground between social innovation and international
development to identify new strategies for systemic
change.
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