Governing local social Innovations against poverty across Europe

In this introductory chapter, we present our understanding of the core concepts of this book, namely social innovation and poverty, and situate these concepts in contemporary debates on the governance of welfare provision. We define social innovation as actions that satisfy social needs through the transformation of social relations, which crucially implies an increase of the capabilities and access to resources of people living in poverty. Poverty is not reduced to a lack of monetary income, but refers to a range of processes of social exclusion in various spheres of life that hinders people’s full participation in society. We outline the aim of this book as a sustained attempt to analyse how the social innovation dynamics of localised initiatives are shaped by the welfare regime context with its specific spatial and institutional characteristics. Finally, we discuss the methodological strategy of the comparative case study research on which this book is based.