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. 2023 Mar 21:8:966918.
doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2023.966918. eCollection 2023.

The role of social innovation in tackling global poverty and vulnerability

Jeremy Millard  1   2 , Vincenzo Fucci  3   4
Affiliations

The role of social innovation in tackling global poverty and vulnerability

Jeremy Millard et al. Front Sociol. .

Abstract

Tackling the rapid rise in global poverty is one of the most pressing challenges the world faces today, especially in this new age of turbulence. On top of the ongoing environmental crisis, the last fifteen years has been rocked by the financial crisis of 2007-8, compounded by the 2020 Covid-pandemic and then by the 2022 war in Ukraine, each of which has negatively impacted all aspects of sustainable development. Although in practice many development organizations have been using the methods and processes of social innovation to tackle poverty and vulnerability for many years, it is only recently that they have specifically begun to analyse and codify its contribution to these and other SDGs. Social innovation provides beneficial social outcomes for citizens and other actors, often at local level with the strong bottom-up involvement of civil society and through its cross-actor, cross-sector, cross-disciplinary and cross-cutting strengths. Importantly, it aims to empower those with a social need, particularly when they have little to begin with. It focuses on increasing the beneficiaries' own agency and capability rather than passively only relying on others to act on their behalf. This is done by transforming social relationships and developing new collaborative processes. Amongst a wide range of recent and contemporary sources, this paper analyses a large scale quantitative and qualitative global survey of social innovations that tackle poverty and vulnerability in different global regions. It examines various definitions of poverty, including extreme, absolute and relative measures as well as arguably more useful approaches like the Multidimensional Poverty Index. It proposes how social innovation should be recalibrated to meet the increasing threats of the new age of turbulence, including by deploying the sociological lens of the agency-structure dichotomy to show why the public sector needs to become involved more proactively in social innovation. It also looks at certain myths around poverty and vulnerability, examines why we need to revise our understanding of sustainable development and resilience, and why a new nexus approach is needed that combines SDG1 with other strongly related SDGs.

Keywords: COVID-19; SDG1; agency and structure; poverty; resilience; social innovation; sustainable development; vulnerability.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Extreme poverty, 2015–2022 (adapted from World Bank., 2022).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Social innovation practices aimed at reducing poverty and vulnerability.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Societal levels addressed.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Innovation trigger.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Innovation adoption.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Actor by sector and geographic region.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Type of actor support.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Beneficiary involvement.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Persons in direct support.
Figure 10
Figure 10
Funding sources by type and geographic region.
Figure 11
Figure 11
Driver types and geographic region.
Figure 12
Figure 12
Barrier types and geographic region.
Figure 13
Figure 13
Scaling the initiative.
Figure 14
Figure 14
Organizational transfer.
Figure 15
Figure 15
Spatial transfer and geographic region.
Figure 16
Figure 16
Three generalized development path models.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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    1. Castro-Arceab K., Vanclay F. (2020). Transformative social innovation for sustainable rural development. J. Rural Stud. 74, 45–54. 10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.11.010 - DOI
    1. Democracy Collaborative (2019). Community Wealth Building. Available online at: https://democracycollaborative.org/cwb (accessed May 29, 2022).

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