[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: [WSF-Discuss] On the bias: 'social innovation' discourse is skewed to maintaining the status quo

Wed Jan 14 05:07:05 CET 2015

hi Kevin

can you post or excerpt from this on our blog, a very good editorial and
critique of social innovation,

Michel

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brian K. Murphy <brian at radicalroad.com>
Date: Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 11:50 PM
Subject: [WSF-Discuss] On the bias: 'social innovation' discourse is skewed
to maintaining the status quo
To: worldsocialforum-discuss at openspaceforum.net

 *https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/remko-berkhout/irresist
<https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/remko-berkhout/irresist>ibly-biased-blind-spots-of-social-innovation*
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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