Inside the black box: in search of conceptual tools for evaluating and designing social innovative practices

Abstract

Social innovation has become a buzzword to refer to local welfare reforms involving citizens as co-producers of local public services (Campomori and Casula 2022). Policy makers use it as a ‘magic concept’ which will help them tackle and solve emerging social problems and reduce inequality (Casula 2022). Still, social innovation remains an elusive, ‘weak’ and strongly contested concept (Moulaert, MacCallum, and Hillier 2013). It involves a plurality of actors – civil society actors or public actors, governmental and non-governmental organizations, social entrepreneurs, and public administrations – and relies on a variety of practices. Social scientists, policy makers and practitioners from different professional and disciplinary fields, have explored the concept from pragmatic and systemic perspectives, adopting both empirical and theoretical approaches, in an attempt to providing a unilateral, multidimensional and clearer definition of social innovation. They mostly have agreed on the ‘transformative power’ that co-creation and cooperation processes, on which social innovation practices rest, might have on society (Ziegler 2017; Schot and Steinmuller 2018). Articles included in this special issue focus on different social innovation practices – grass roots product innovation; community-led social innovation – and their implementation in different realms of local governance – integration of refugees, of minorities, of disabilities – and in different regional contexts, inside and outside the borders of the European Union. They share two main concerns which relate to the elusiveness of the concept: how to assess social innovation qualitatively and quantitatively, and how to institutionalize social innovation, making it not only successful but also durable, sustainable and selfsupporting. Theory is closely related to practice: the authors are aware that the spread of social innovation practices depends on the possibility to define social innovation and provide tools allowing actors to distinguish successful from unsuccessful social innovative practices, to evaluate and elaborate them, to assess risks. The empirical research cases presented in the following pages clearly demonstrate that the implementation of social innovative practices is not a straightforward process,but rather faces resistance and challenges and requires negotiations at many levels among different actors. This emerges markedly from the first group of articles – a mini special issue – composed of an introduction and 6 articles – presenting the results of the Interreg project (2019–2021) titled: ‘Integrating Refugees in Society and Labour Market through Social Innovation (SIforREF)’. As Casula, Campomori and Kazepov make clear in their introduction, in 2017, when they applied for funding, social innovation seemed the most