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Climate emergency, social inequalities, poverty, or racism represent only some entries on a growing list of pressing issues that concern society. Scholars are trying to play their part in investigating and informing effective action on these grand challenges of our times (Howard-Grenville et al. 2019). Across geographic contexts and fields of activity, social innovation moves into the centre of attention across the social sciences as an effective response to these challenges (Anheier, Krlev, & Mildenberger, 2019; George et al. 2019; Howaldt et al. 2019; Jacobi, Edmiston, and Ziegler 2017; Rao-Nicholson, Vorley, and Khan 2017). Current examples of social innovation range from new employment models built on a special ability image of disability (Hockerts 2015), to decentralised renewable energy production (Huybrechts and Haugh 2017), to new forms of contracting social service provision, such as social impact bonds (Edmiston and Nicholls 2017). However, social innovation is not a new phenomenon. Historical examples comprise social housing (Schimpf et al. 2020) and public freshwater supply (Schimpf and Ziegler 2020), or mutual and co-operative movements (Tischer et al. 2016). Also, explicit references to social innovation in the social sciences date at least back to the late 1980s (Zapf 1989). And yet we are still in search for a systematic overview of the complications of understanding innovation and societal transformation when the ‘social’ comes in – while most agree social innovation is somehow different from ‘innovation as we know it’ (Dawson and Daniel 2010; Nicholls and Murdock 2012; Oosterlynck 2013; Van Wijk et al. 2018 to name but a few).
The diversity of engaged actors and proponents of social innovation is one component in making its investigation challenging. Social innovation is promoted by civil society organizations such as social enterprises (Ramus et al. 2018; Seelos and Mair 2017), firms (Phillips et al. 2015), or public administration (Moulaert et al. 2007). A second component is represented by the circumstance that social innovation is often not a single service or product (Krlev, Anheier, and Mildenberger 2019a), but may comprise complex social processes such as shifts in public discourse as currently witnessed in the Black Lives Matter movement, for example. Scholars have recently drawn on both of these components and as a way to deal with the resulting specificities suggested a multi-level perspective analysis (Pel et al. 2020), which has a tradition in the literature on socio-technological transitions that may span decades of analysis (Geels 2002). In addition to approaches that provide us with the bigger picture of the social innovation process, we need to advance knowledge about how organizational conditions may affect social innovation performance (Shier, Handy, and Jennings 2019; Tortia, Degavre, and Poledrini 2020) as well as the (potential) impacts and outcomes social innovators may create (Berzin, Pitt-Catsouphes, and Gaitan-Rossi 2015; Taylor, Torugsa, and Arundel 2019) – as a goal and as a by-product in the process of innovating socially. The articles in our special issue are contributing to these emergent streams of literature.
The relationship between many G20 governments and organized civil society has become more complex, laden with tensions, and such that both have to find more optimal modes of engagement. In some instances, state-civil society relations have worsened, leading some experts and activists to speak of a “shrinking space” for civil society. How wide-spread is this phenomenon? Are these more isolated occurrences or indeed part of a more general development? How can countries achieve and maintain an enabling environment for civil society? The authors suggest that much of the current impasse results foremost from outdated and increasingly ill-suited regulatory frameworks that fail to accommodate a much more diverse and expanded set of civil society organizations (CSO). In response, they propose a differentiated model for a regulatory framework based on functional roles. Based on quantitative profiling and expert surveys, moreover, the paper also derives initial recommendations on how governments and civil society could find ways to relate to each other in both national and multilateral contexts.
This paper examines the policy approaches and measures that developed market economies countries have adopted to “manage” what has become known as the Dahrendorf Quandary, a profound challenge facing globalizing economies: over time, staying economically competitive requires either adopting measures detrimental to the cohesion of society or restricting civil liberties and political participation. Examining a range of countries over time, it is found that their policy choices and subsequent performance are too varied to support the inevitable, almost mechanical, incompatibility the Quandary implies. While balancing the relationship between economic globalization, social cohesion, and democracy continues to be a major challenge for developed market economies, results show they are not helpless in what Dahrendorf feared to be a Herculean task of “squaring the circle” among incompatible trends. In other words, while the tensions the Quandary posits apply, they nonetheless need not lead to similar or negative outcomes.