Social innovation: Redesigning the welfare diamond

Abstract

Decades of neoliberal economics and politics have resulted in major shifts in much of the world in the ways that policy and research communities now understand, shape and work to organise relations between civil society and the state and within civil society itself. Over the last fifteen years, as neoliberalism clearly revealed its limits, these communities began to deploy a range of new or reworked concepts to address ongoing challenges. Social innovation is one. Social cohesion, social inclusion and social investment are three other examples.