A conversation on Social Innovation

David Miller: Bill can you introduce us to this concept of social innovation.

Bill Slee: I'll try but it is quite a challenge, because so many people have come at social
innovation from so many different angles, that it's quite a slippery and and elusive concept.

Bill Slee: For me, at its heart is the idea of civil society getting more involved in a whole variety
of actions often tackling some of the grand societal challenges of our time.

Depopulation from rural areas, the aging population, climate change or whatever. But instead
of having top down policies driving everything, what we're seeing, increasingly I think, is a
proliferation of civil society activity that's taking the lead often in small ways in isolated
communities. People are beginning to say, you know, we need to respond ourselves but not
acting individualistically, they're acting collectively. And I guess one of the things I've seen
mostly since I retired partly and I've lived in a village for 30 years and in an active working life
you actually realize that for most of those 30 years I've just slept there. You haven't actually
lived there, and for the last three or four years in a semi-retired state. I've become so much
more active in the community and what I've found when you scratch the surface of a
community is you come across so many more civil society organizations that are doing really
important stuff: Running a car scheme to get elderly immobile people to hospitals, running
community gardens, running community woodlands and I've become increasingly involved in
those myself and it's been really quite transformational experience for me.

David Miller: So you are a researcher and you've also now been involved in practice and social
innovation. Would you like to give us something of a sense of your journey into social
innovation.

Bill Slee: My journey really was being involved in the drafting of the SIMRA project and I guess
community-led development is something that's been an interest of mine for many many
years. But I've been interested as a researcher and I've tended to come at it from a theoretical
perspective.

But what's happened in the last three years is that I've been able to firstly research it as part
of the SIMRA team but secondly be more and more involved in grassroots community activity
in my village and that gives you a kind of relationship where you can bounce theory against
practice and I think that's quite a healthy place to be.

David Miller: Well theory and practice in social innovation I think we need to explore what a
definition might be of social innovation. Can you give us any insights into definitions.

Bill Slee: Well what I can say is that there are a lot of definitions out there and they're not all
A conversation on Social Innovation

consistent. So what you find is that some people have a very broad definition and that broad
definition includes any new policy initiative even from the top down that deals with social
issues. Some would argue the National Health Services introduction in Britain was a social
innovation. I wouldn't. I'd say that was policy innovation. Some of them are narrower
definitions. Look at social innovation, it's only dealing with disadvantaged people. But actually
I think social innovation is about collaboration and people coming together whether or not
it's for disadvantaged people or not. And as you look at those definitions, oh other definitions
only look at innovations that are successful, but frankly innovations that fail are a fantastic
opportunity to learn about what's caused failure.

So I think we need to be broad enough to encompass a variety of citizen led activities often in
partnership with municipalities or other agencies. And we need to be able to accommodate a
diversity of activities where citizens have a really active role in what's going on.

David Miller: There is one definition which is quite commonly used I think it's the Bureau of
European policy advisers. Any observations about that one.

Bill Slee: Well it's a very long definition. And to me it's a bit narrow because it talks about
innovations that are social in their ends and in social in their means. I think when we're looking
especially at rural social innovation that some of the ends can be environmental they can do
with adapting to climate change or they could be about trying to support the regeneration
and diversification of the rural economy. So I want that word social to be broadened out. But
the social is embedded for me in the process of people coming together to act.

David Miller: Well the process of people coming together must be for the academic part of
our interests underpinned by some sort of theoretical concepts. Can you expand on any of
those of relevance to social innovation.

Bill Slee: Well I could say rather like the definitions, the theoretical perspectives are very
varied. They come from innovation theory which has moved from something that was much
more individualistic to something now that's an innovation system with different actors and
many of those representations include civil society as important actors. We could look at
endogenous development theory which talks about bottom up development. We could look
at social capital because we know that strong social capital underpins effective collaboration
so we can jump from economic theory, geographical theory, to sociological theory.

But if there's one bit that brings that together increasingly, for me it's the transition theorists.
This group started off in the Netherlands 10 or 15 years ago and what they've argued is that
there's a need for regime change that as we know it things aren't working. We had the huge
economic crisis in 2009. We've got the threat of climate change. We don't seem to be terribly
able to fix that. We need to think about other ways of doing it and the transition theorists
A conversation on Social Innovation

argue that you need lots of niche developments effectively pilots and trials and if you think
about social innovation it provides exactly that seedbed of diverse trials and efforts to come
at things differently. And so those trials and opportunities may be upscalable and if we can
upscale that then begins to lead towards a completely different way of organizing things. And
I suspect that will probably in the longer term provide the dominant theoretical underpinning
possibly with a little bit of socio ecological systems theory as well. Because we're dealing with
not just people but people in an environment which is threatened, threatened by water
shortages, threatened by forest fires, threatened by climate change threatened by the loss of
biodiversity. So we can't look at humans in isolation from the biophysical environment of
which they're part.

David Miller: Where would we put social learning in that story?

Bill Slee: I think as people in an environment interact. You can either tell them what to do or
you can help them learn what to do. And I think social learning is really an active part of it.
And if you involve civil society and you empower civil society you set them on a learning
journey and you hold their hand and you take them there.And I think actually it's sometimes
an uncomfortable experience for both policy community and for theorists because we're kind
of expected to tell people what to do rather than have mutual learning and synergy between
the practitioners and the researchers which is where we ought to be going. We've had that
transfer of technology that top down approach which I think is beginning to be transformed
in a lot of actually more practical scientific endeavor. We want stakeholders. We want trans-
disciplinary approaches now to be involved in what we do.

David Miller: Now the potential for trans disciplinary approach and the context for top down
and bottom up is going to vary is it not geographically? For instance around Europe, are things
consistent or are they different?

Bill Slee: No. They're very very different. Even within Europe and Europe does have many
things in common. We can find for example in Northern Europe a very strong welfare state.
And if you've got a reasonably robust economy and you've got a strong welfare state, the
niches in which social innovation needs to occur are much smaller than in a country where
you've got let's say a more stagnant economy that then impacts on state incomes, austerity
arises and actually you've got much much more space. The niches are much larger where
social innovation needs to come in and substitute for example for failing services for elderly
care failing services for addressing climate change issues and so on. So in that environment of
austerity and economic difficulty the seedbed for social innovation is much larger.And there's
one other thing as well, as people are more mobile and young people move away then actually
the family and the household as an ability to deliver many social services. It declines. Children
can't look after elderly parents if they're working a thousand miles away. So we need to think
about these four bits of the economy: the state, the market, the household, the community.
And I think my argument would be that the community bed is becoming more important partly
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because of the erosion of the state, partly because of the fragmentation of families and partly
because in quite large areas of Europe there's really challenging economic transformations
taking place.

David Miller: Well you mention Europe you mention the sort of challenges, the challenges our
policymakers and politicians are charged with responding to as well. What sort of engagement
has policy had with social innovation.

Bill Slee: It's had some pretty high level rhetorical engagement. The former president of the
European Commission Barroso, he argued that social innovation needed to be at the heart of
things. President Obama set up an office for social innovation. But since then it's one of those
concepts that kind of can slip into the background a bit and we see it quite well represented
in the European Social Fund. But it's not perhaps as overtly present in the rural development
field but it's there nonetheless it's there in LEADER which has always been about bottom up
development and about partnership at a local level.And it's increasingly there in the smart
villages initiative which is really being pushed in the new RDP.

David Miller: So the RDP is the rural development program.

Bill Slee: That's right. The Rural Development Program which it's the part of the CAP that
addresses the broader rural economic and societal concerns. But we also have the other bits
of the Structural Fund, the European Social Fund and the Regional Development Fund and in
parts of those social innovation has been much more strongly articulated than in the rural
domain.

David Miller: Now where social innovation fit in relation to the delivery of goods and services.

Bill Slee: Well as I said before it can fit, in relation to change, in any of those four boxes we
talked about. So if the family is less capable of caring for its elderly because the family is more
fragmented then we've seen some fantastic social care initiatives emerging through social
enterprise that takes responsibility for that. If we look at the withdrawal should we say a public
transport services you can see some wonderful community transport initiatives taking place
all over Europe. So, and if we look at remote areas of Scotland and the closure of village shops,
then quite often these have become now community cooperatives run for the community.
And one more if we think about the remotest parts of Scotland and Northwest Ireland, now
70 percent of the total land area is in the hands of communities and they're putting in social
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housing they're putting in hospices they're putting in little advanced factories to try to bring
young people back and these are socially organized. These are social innovations. They're
things that might have happened in other bits of the economy in the past but they're now
being driven by the communities themselves. And for me that is really, really significant.

David Miller: So with the markets and the private sector, with the state, national, regional and
local levels, with households and with the third sector the proportions of contribution that
each of these four might make into the future will change through do you think?

Bill Slee: I think where we have seen many public sector bodies affected by austerity and I
don't see the state expanding inside, so the public sector is not going to grow. And I think
there will be expectation that the third sector fills that niche. It can't fill it always and it can't
fill it everywhere because the capabilities vary over space. So it raises some really important
questions about as we go forward and especially in areas facing economic difficulty and
demographic decline what are we going to do in those really marginalized communities. How
can we uplift their performance to help them begin to cope with the challenges that lie ahead.

David Miller: Ok, so what's happening in the drivers of social innovation, over space and time,
the political and social choices? Any observations to make on that?

Bill Slee: Well certainly in the aftermath of the economic crisis the pressure for social
innovation was enormous. I think it's still there but it's kind of operating in different ways. As
I said earlier it's these almost laboratories for trialling alternative ways of doing things. And
what we're finding from results is that quite often we're getting better results from working
through that third sector model, whether it's a question of people's commitment or whether
it's a question of having strict profit out of the equation or having stripped the bureaucratic
inertia of municipalities and the state out. There's something about the best social innovation
projects that seems to me to offer many many win win situations where you're delivering the
service more effectively and you're engaging with your community. You're rebuilding
citizenship in ways that I think are profoundly important in addressing the issues of nativism
and nationalism and the kind of issues that are troubling many many people in Europe today.

David Miller: So the road ahead. What are the challenges to be faced on that?

Bill Slee: I think because it's such a broad concept and it can operate through so many areas
of life whether it's environment social or economic. Trying to get policy architecture in place
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that can deliver the kind of support and that can deliver it consistently. Because if you go into
say former socialist countries in Europe they've got different institutional architecture. If you
go to somewhere like Scotland we are blessed with a government that has supported
community empowerment in ways like almost no other country in Europe. So we're really
really lucky. And if you look at what that's done it's empowered social innovation and it's
rebuild that relationship between citizenry and government in ways that I think are very very
positive. But that's not happening everywhere. So we can't simply design policy at a European
level and expect it to trickle down. We've got to have multi-scalar approaches that from
municipal level, through regional level, national level and at European level promote social
innovation more effectively. And sometimes there are people who have an interest in blocking
that change. Sometimes the municipalities seem to be a brake rather than an agency in
promoting change and somebody has to do the unblocking so that we can let these really
interesting experiments thrive and prosper.

David Miller: And some policies rebooted perhaps?

Bill Slee: Indeed, I think if you look at LEADER, it was the great hope in rural development
policy when it came in in the 1990s and it was truly innovative and it took risks. Maybe we
need to reboot LEADER but it's been municipalized so much that it's almost gone to sleep and
lost its innovative spirit. And I'd like to see it rebooted revitalized and helping with that smart
village's agenda that the European Commission wants to push and there's going to be some
need for resources for delivering societal well-being. Indeed and there always is and that again
means perhaps that public sector agency that delivers and supports that well-being has to
work out ways of better engaging with civil society to create those possibilities. And again
sometimes it can be a little bit slow because they're protecting their own interests more than
actually advancing well-being and public agency doesn't always operate in the public's
interest. It sometimes operates in its own.

David Miller: Bill, thank you for that introduction to social innovation.