The multi-scalar puzzle of social innovation

Most of the scholars emphasise its local dimension and the bottom-up dynamics as the modus of social innovation. At the same time, they tend to assume that other (higher) spatial, institutional and political levels are hostile to social innovation. These assumptions entail manifold risks for both social research and action. In this chapter, we challenge the idea that social innovation is a solely bottom-up practice, to embrace a more comprehensive and relational approach on how it actually moves between and across scales, depending on the strategies it adopts and on the institutional scalar arrangements framing its development. We do not argue that the local does not play a relevant and special role. Many initiatives are indeed ‘bottom-linked’ and the ‘local’ is the level where all other levels conflate. The same cannot be said about the supra-local dimensions, which might play an irrelevant role in socially innovative initiatives.
The case studies analysis of the ImPRovE project highlights which scales are mainly involved in social innovation and how opportunities and constraints are distributed among those scales. A typology of social innovation is proposed aimed at overcoming the narrow conceptualisation of social innovation as solely a bottom-up practice, by looking at the strategies that socially innovative initiatives adopt in order to establish connections between and across scales. Finally, the potential avenues for further research are described to better disentangle the multi-scalar puzzle of social innovation.