Cistas presents at SASE 31st Annual Conference 2019

**ENGELSK**
Lara Monticelli præsenterede følgende ved SASE 31st Annual Conference 2019: Fathomless Futures: Algorithmic and Imagined in New York:

"Social Movements and Social Innovation in Sustainability Transitions"

Abstrakt:

Numerous initiatives worldwide aspire to contribute to sustainability transitions. In this paper, we focus on the phenomena of translocal social movements and social innovation initiatives. The paper starts by discussing three fields of research: (1) sustainability transition, (2) social movements and (3) social innovation. These three fields are represented by the specialisation of the three respective authors, which have so far not yet been explicitly related. Based on a succinct, comparative literature review of the three fields, we formulate a conceptual framework to empirically distinguish and analyse the role of social movements and social innovation initiatives in contributing to sustainability transitions.

We then move on to analyse four case-studies that can be characterised as social movements that are working on social innovation(s) and that have explicit transformative ambitions to contribute to sustainability transitions: (1) community energy/ decentralised energy prosumption, (2) the global ecovillage movement, (3) the Impact Hub of social ‘impact’ entrepreneurs, and (4) the international movement of participatory budgeting. We use an embedded case-study approach, based on in-depth interviews, participant observation and document review, to study these four case-studies at two different scales: translocal networks and local initiatives.

While these case-studies are significantly diverse in their innovation focus (socio-technical, socio-ecological socio-economic and/or socio-political) and their institutional orientation (NGO, community, market and/or state), they share a number of important characteristics. In our comparative analysis, we distinguish five mechanisms through which these movements contribute to transitions: (1) “prefiguration” as a way to ‘reproduce in the present the kind of society they envision for the future’, (2) diverse socio-material innovation across societal systems, (3) translocal empowerment by being locally rooted as well as globally connected, (4) a diverse repertoire of actions (incl. protest, lobbying, education etc.), and (5) engaging in strategic collaboration across (overlapping) movements. After the analysis of each case, a comparative discussion across the cases allows us to draw insights on the transformative potential of social movements and social innovation initiatives for sustainability transitions, as well as formulate avenues for future research.

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