Towards a systemic ecosystem perspective on the mainstreaming of innovative eco-social practices.

At times local social innovations spread and replicate across geographical scales and even reach global impact. However, most of the time social innovations remain niche phenomena, as evidenced in the cases of Eco-Villages, FabLabs, or Slow Food researched under the EU TRANSIT project (EU TRANSIT, 2024). Thus, there is a risk that they fail to effectively change the way most people live. Succinctly put, social innovations do barely change eco-social practices. This disjuncture between the potential attribution to social innovations and their actual impact has been researched from different disciplines (Brandsen et al., 2016; Chalmers, 2013; Lam et al., 2020; Mulgan, 2006). However, it largely remains unclear why most social innovations do not gain sufficient momentum in shifting practices in the direction of greater eco-social sustainability at large. We understand social innovations as new solutions to social problems (Pel et al., 2020) and eco-social practices as ecological and socially desirable ways of producing, consuming, and living (Gibson-Graham & Roelvink, 2016; Haxeltine et al., 2017). Building on these understandings, a social innovation is the nucleus around which a new social practice can evolve. As most of our current social challenges are strongly intertwined with ecological challenges (Klitkou et al., 2022), we use the term eco-social practices as the sensitizing metaphor of this paper. Social innovations and the associated eco-social practices that they try to cultivate, foster, or alter are embedded within socio-economic, ecological, political, financial, and/or technological systems. These systems define the resource endowment and “the rules of the game”; both on a micro-level (the purpose, the fit of a social innovation with an existing need in the society, or organizational challenges), as well as in the interplay of the social innovation with other relevant actors. And whenever (transdisciplinary) actors come together and join forces around a social innovation, power structures may be transformed (Avelino, 2021; De Geus et al., 2023). As displayed in Figure 1, the landscape, the regime, and the social innovations influence each other, as for example a policy or an institutionalized structure in the financing system might influence the power distribution or the mainstreaming of a social innovation.