Social Innovations as Messages: Democratic Experimentation in Local Welfare Systems

Abstract

This chapter identifies and analyses recurring approaches and instruments in local social innovations that differ from those dominating in the past and prevailing presently. These include the search for new ways of addressing users and citizens; the emphasis on new risks and related approaches to the issues of rights and responsibilities, ways of organising and working; and finally the concern with issues of governance. The features of these local innovations may have significance for welfare systems at large, going beyond the introduction of special new items in special fields. Secondly, the chapter discusses the kinds of typical relationships of innovations with their environments, as they are embedded in local contexts, reaching from tolerance to policies of mainstreaming. This helps to determine the local conditions and support innovations required for innovations to unfold, blossom and become part of changing local welfare systems in various ways. For the discussion of policies on social innovation, that is, approaches and instruments, and of politics of social innovation, shaping the processes of their development over time, a common metaphor is used: understanding social innovations as messages with a content that may be read and understood differently by the addressees in the (local) contexts, assuming such messages find their ways, are read and interpreted with some degree of interest.