People-Centered Social Innovation as an Epistemological Alternative for Critical Recentering of People in the Development Agenda

There are many complexities in today’s world, and alternatives are needed to open up spaces for truly reconfiguring people-centeredness in the current development agenda. This editorial piece, therefore, envisages a shift in the development narrative through the conceptualisation of people-centered social innovation that provides an epistemic alternative. The effort is to accelerate people-centered change through critically recentering people, especially marginalised groups and communities. This includes understanding the contextual and structural inequities, people’s knowledges and agency emerging from their embedded context, and institutionalising empowering spaces for actors that turn the wheel of social relations for epistemic justice.