Navigating Social and Environmental Transitions: Synthesizing a novel conceptual model for social innovation support, and groundtruthing the model in the case of the Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve

The 21st century has brought changes to interconnected social and environmental systems at unprecedented paces, scales, and levels of complexity. Societies around the world face uncertainty around ways to adapt to new biophysical, economic, and social dynamics while still maintaining their cultural identity. Moreover, governments and societies are grappling with profound questions over how to design and manage governance systems that can safeguard and advance multiple discrete and sometimes competing needs and interests from diverse stakeholders and community members during social and environmental transitions. Social Innovation models have gained renewed attention in recent years as alternatives to top-down planning approaches, with advocates arguing that these models enable enhanced buy-in from diverse stakeholders, illuminate novel aspects of a social or environmental question, source relevant information directly from knowledge holders, and generate strategies that are better tailored to the local context. However, despite recent methodological and procedural advances in such models, there continue to be knowledge gaps concerning what types of information are needed to guide a social innovation program to achieve such results and how to assess program effectiveness at enabling stakeholders to navigate transitions. In this article, we propose a conceptual model to fill such gaps that combines the Collaborative Environmental Conflict Management (CECM) framework with a social innovation paradigm and Ostrom’s principles for governing the commons. The conceptual framework model describes the information needs across the life cycle of social innovation processes aimed at facilitating adaptation in social-ecological transitions. We draw insight from the case study of the Urdaibai Deep Listening process in the Basque Country to highlight tools and approaches that can facilitate information generation and deployment in a social innovation process. Finally, we point to areas of conceptual and technical development needed to enhance the value proposition of social innovation models as complementary to traditional policy processes.