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  • Social Innovation and Resilience: How One Enhances the Other

    June 13, 2013 Editor 0

    By Frances Westley

    SUPPLEMENT TO SSIR FUNDED BY THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION

    In 1972 Bunker Roy and a small group
    of colleagues set up the Barefoot College
    in Tilonia, Rajasthan, India. Their
    vision was an interesting and catalytic
    one, joining old and new, traditional
    and radical. Informed by the teachings and
    philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi—giving
    the poor and the dispossessed the means to
    produce their own necessities—the Barefoot
    College trained the poor to build their
    own homes, to become teachers in their own
    schools, and to produce, install, and operate
    solar panels in their villages. Roy and his colleagues
    also emphasized empowering women
    in general and grandmothers in particular.
    As a result, “professional” expertise was
    placed in the hands of the poorest of the poor
    and the weakest of the weak: village women.

    In one way, Barefoot College’s innovations
    were deeply radical—challenging the
    conventions of village life, professional associations,
    and traditional culture. In another
    way they were classic bricolage, a term drawn
    from the junk collectors in France and defined
    as “making creative and resourceful use
    of whatever materials are at hand (regardless
    of their original purpose).” In this case
    the juxtaposition of elements not normally
    combined addressed a cluster of intractable
    problems including the health needs, gender
    inequalities, energy needs, and educational
    needs of the developing South.

    Barefoot College is clearly a social innovation,
    and a successful one, that has spread
    across the developing world: Women from
    African villages have traveled to India to
    learn about its ideas and practices, and
    graduate students from North America are
    applying the concepts to aboriginal communities
    in the North.1

    By juxtaposing the old and the new, the
    technological and the social, and the political
    and the economic, social innovations
    build a resilient social-ecological system.
    With the earth and its ecological systems
    pushed close to planetary boundaries, we
    need innovative solutions that take into account
    the complexity of the problems and
    then foster solutions that permit our systems
    to learn, adapt, and occasionally transform
    without collapsing. More important,
    we need to build the capacity to find such
    solutions over and over again.

    Part of building resilience in complex
    systems is strengthening cultures of innovation.
    These are cultures that value diversity,
    because as any bricoleur knows, the more
    (and more different) the parts, the greater
    the possibility of new and radical combinations.
    But these cultures also need to encourage
    the kind of communication and engagement
    that allows disparate elements to meet
    and mingle, and that allows for experimentation
    and support rather than blame. Such
    cultures support social innovation, and social
    innovation in turn builds resilience.

    Resilience theory is becoming more
    popular as a lens to focus on linked socialecological
    systems at all scales, from the
    individual, to the organization, to the community,
    to the region, and to the globe. As
    a theory, it is deeply interdisciplinary, representing
    the intersection of psychology,
    ecology, organization theory, community
    studies, and economics.2 It is similar to sustainability
    science in that it is a whole system
    approach that posits inextricable links
    between the North and the South and between
    the economy and the environment.
    But it differs in that it focuses on the balance
    between continuity and change, a continuous
    (or infinite) cycle of release, reorganization,
    growth, and consolidation that characterizes
    all resilient living systems.3

    In the release and reorganization phases,
    new elements may be combined in new ways.
    In the growth and consolidation phases,
    these new combinations attract resources
    and capital and deliver returns in energy,
    biomass, or productivity on which the system
    depends and thrives. To understand this concept,
    think about a mature forest, with energy
    and physical capital stored up in biomass.
    A forest fire triggers a release of energy and
    resources. New life forms spring up in the fertile
    ground, absorbing the nutrients quickly.
    Some of these forms are species that have
    lived in that forest before; others are new. Not
    all can survive, so a pattern of dominance results
    in some species dying out and others accumulating
    biomass to grow to a mature forest.
    Resilience theory suggests that a serious loss of system resilience happens only when
    the system gets trapped at some point in the
    cycle: System resilience lies in the continuous
    movement through the cycle, causing the
    system to adapt or transform in the process.

    Now consider this cycle applied to innovation,
    either technical or social. As Joseph
    Schumpeter outlined in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, entrepreneurs come up
    with new ideas, using the resources available.
    Some ideas fail, but others take wing and become
    new products, programs, processes, or
    designs that attract resources and become
    part of the established system. Here too we
    see a similar pattern: the association of old
    and new ideas in the idea generation stage; a
    shakeout of competing ideas and organizations
    in favor of those able to attract the most
    resources; a pattern of dominance and consolidation
    of successful ideas and organizations;
    and the institutionalization of the innovations
    so that they become business as usual.

    The similarity between the cycle of innovation
    and the cycle of the release and renewal
    of resilient ecosystems is striking. But
    resilience theory suggests that for the broader
    system (the organization, the community,
    or the broader society) to be resilient, it is not
    enough to innovate. Society needs to build
    the capacity for repetition—over and over
    again, forever. Moreover, although many
    innovations allow for adaptation (such as
    portable homes for the homeless that allow
    the homeless to live more successfully in
    extreme temperatures),4 other innovations,
    more disruptive and radical, have the potential
    to transform the system. This was the
    case of the Barefoot College.

    What Resilience Brings to Social Innovation

    Resilience theory has many lessons to
    teach people involved in social innovation.
    The most important is the need to look at a
    problem systemically. Western culture has
    a long history of introducing solutions (particularly
    technical ones) designed to solve a
    specific problem, without considering the
    broader system impacts the solution might
    have. Consider the race to develop biofuels.
    The current preoccupation with finding energy
    sources to replace fossil fuels and petroleum-based products threatens to neglect
    the multiple system impacts that the production
    of biofuel has on the environment
    and society. For example, because biofuels
    can be grown on poor land (a plus from the point of view of producers), they are likely to
    absorb land currently used for subsistence
    agriculture in the developing world, making
    food security even more precarious.5

    Another example of negative unintended
    consequences on the larger system is the
    development of ecotourism in the Galapagos
    Islands. The islands offer unparalleled
    biodiversity. To maintain this diversity and
    to stimulate the local Ecuadorian economy,
    ecotourism companies compete to bring
    small groups of tourists to the islands. The
    government controls how many people
    can disembark on an island, but there is
    less control over the number of boats that
    can sail or motor close to an island. As a result,
    the increasing numbers of boats have
    caused drastic erosion of the coral reefs.
    What may seem like a panacea can turn out,
    when viewed from the point of view of the
    larger system, to be an illusion.

    A historical example of an innovation
    gone wrong was the residential school system
    for aboriginal Canadians. Proponents
    believed that the best way to “help” aboriginal
    people was to assimilate them by teaching
    them European culture, language, religion,
    and economic practices. To accomplish
    this, the government removed hundreds of
    children from their homes and put them into
    residential schools, forbidding them to use
    their native language. At the time most white
    Canadians saw the practice as an innovative
    solution to the problems of First Nations
    people. But even in the light of the social philosophy
    of the time, it was an intervention
    that took no account of the systemic nature
    of the problem. The intervention deeply undermined
    the general resilience of aboriginal
    communities, greatly exacerbating the problems
    that the initiative tried to resolve. It destroyed
    communal ties and lineage lines and
    left a whole generation not only poorly assimilated,
    but stripped of its cultural identity.
    It is an extreme example of failing to consider
    the systemic nature of a social problem when
    attempting an innovative intervention.

    Understanding resilience can also help
    social innovators balance top-down and bottom-up approaches to crafting solutions. For
    example, relief agencies were concerned that
    the trauma of displacement would cause Eritrean
    women living in refugee camps to suffer
    post-traumatic stress. But it turned out
    that as long as the women were able to create
    coherent accounts or stories and share them
    with others, their stress was manageable. Similarly, when efforts were made to provide
    people with their traditional foods (such as
    “famine foods”), communities were much
    more resilient in the face of famine. Because
    of experiences such as these, international
    relief organizations are increasingly working
    closely with local people (by listening and
    learning) rather than immediately responding
    with top-down solutions.6

    Governments strongly influence setting
    the parameters and creating the opportunities
    for innovation to occur at local levels.
    One of the best examples was the Brazilian
    government’s response to the escalating
    cases of HIV-AIDS. In 1990 the World Bank
    found that Brazil was one of the worst hit
    countries, with almost twice as many people
    infected as South Africa. The World Bank
    predicted that both Brazil and South Africa
    would see astronomical increases by the year
    2000. The World Bank recommended that
    Brazil abandon efforts to treat people with
    HIV-AIDS and instead focus on prevention.
    But the Brazilian government ignored the
    advice and decided to unleash local creativity
    and innovation. The parameters were
    that no person—regardless of how poor, insignificant,
    or illiterate he or she was—would
    be written off as beyond cure. They lobbied
    the World Health Organization to reduce
    the costs of anti-viral drugs and launched an
    effective communication strategy to make
    the use of condoms sexy. They then gave
    enormous discretion to community leaders,
    including priests and nuns in local parishes,
    to figure out how to reach every infected person.
    Health care clinicians worked alongside
    NGOs to provide the full range of services
    needed, including testing, education, and delivering
    and supervising medication.

    Despite its high illiteracy rate, Brazil
    achieved the same compliance rate across
    all communities as the United States. By
    2000 the infection rate had dropped to 1 in
    160, a far cry from the 1 in 4 predicted by the
    World Bank. This is an example of resilience
    theory at work—looking at the problem and
    solution systemically, across scales and subsystems,
    and taking account of the roles that
    local knowledge and government policy can
    play in crafting a solution.7

    What Social Innovation Brings to Resilience

    One of the most important attributes that
    a social innovation approach offers is that
    it helps people understand the process by
    8 Innovation for a Complex World
    which social systems adapt or are transformed.
    In particular, the approach shines
    a light on the various actors (such as social
    entrepreneurs and system entrepreneurs)
    who help these processes happen.

    A large amount of research on social entrepreneurs
    has been undertaken. Less research
    has been done, however, on the system
    entrepreneurs who are responsible for finding
    the opportunities to leverage innovative
    ideas for much greater system impact. The
    skills of the system entrepreneur are quite different
    from, but complementary to, those of
    the social entrepreneur.

    The system entrepreneur plays different
    roles at different points in the innovation
    cycle, but all of these roles are geared
    toward finding opportunities to connect an
    alternative approach to the resources of the
    dominant system. Opportunities occur most
    frequently when there has been some release
    of resources through political turnover, economic
    crisis, or cultural shift. In the Great
    Bear Rain Forest in British Columbia (BC),
    Canada, a political and economic crisis was
    provoked by the success of aboriginal land
    claims in the BC courts and the success of
    Greenpeace International’s marketing campaign.
    This crisis created an opportunity for
    system entrepreneurs (a coalition of several
    NGOs) to convene a series of meetings and
    facilitate a process that allowed stakeholders
    who had been vehemently opposed to one another
    (aboriginal groups, logging companies,
    logging communities, the BC government,
    and environmental NGOs) to put aside their
    differences and begin to create solutions.

    As these solutions multiplied, the system
    entrepreneurs moved into a new role:
    that of broker. They created bundles of financial,
    social, and technical solutions that
    offered a real alternative to the status quo.
    Once workable coalitions of actors and ideas
    had been forged, system entrepreneurs assumed
    yet another role—selling these ideas
    to those able to support the alternative with
    resources, policies, and media support.
    When policies were made to formalize new
    protection policies, financial support packages,
    and cultural promotion, the system
    entrepreneurs changed roles yet again by
    going back to the beginning of the cycle and
    reframing and challenging the status quo. In
    the process, the capacity of the social system
    as a whole to manage such transformations
    and adaptations had been strengthened.
    The same process is being used in a modified form in current negotiations around
    the boreal forest.8

    In many instances, this kind of transformation
    takes many years. It requires a long
    period of preparation in which an innovative
    alternative is developed and then scaled
    up when a window of opportunity opens.
    In Chile, the window of opportunity for the
    introduction of community fisheries came
    with the intersection of an environmental
    crisis (the crash of the local fishery because
    of overfishing) and a political crisis (the coup
    that unseated President Augusto Pinochet’s
    regime). System entrepreneurs had been
    preparing for such an opportunity for many
    years by creating experimental sites in a few
    communities, creating a shadow network of
    international and national scientists, and
    maintaining good relationships with politicians
    and bureaucrats expected to survive Pinochet.
    Because of that preparation, within a
    few years of the coup a new fisheries law was
    passed, enshrining community-based fisheries
    and environment-based management.9

    Of course, “managing for emergence” is
    easier in some cultures than others. Some
    cultures allow ideas to move freely and
    quickly, combining with other ideas in the
    kind of bricolage necessary for innovation.
    Studies of resilience at the community, organizational,
    and individual levels suggest that
    these same qualities characterize organizations
    and communities that are resilient to
    crisis and collapse. The characteristics that
    these organizations and communities share
    are low hierarchy, adequate diversity, an
    emphasis on learning over blame, room for
    experimentation, and mutual respect. These
    are all qualities that support general resilience.
    If they are attended to, the capacity for
    social innovation will also increase, creating
    a virtuous cycle that in turn builds the resilience
    of the entire society.10

    Final Thoughts

    People involved in social innovation and
    people involved in creating a resilient society
    can learn much from one another. Resilience
    theory suggests that the processes
    of adaptation and transformation are dynamic,
    cyclical, and infinite. Social innovation
    is not a fixed solution either; it is part
    of a process that builds social resilience and
    allows complex systems to change while
    maintaining the continuity we rely on for
    our personal, organizational, and community
    integrity and identity.

    To create a resilient society, it is important
    not to rely solely on the social entrepreneurs
    who come up with innovative ideas.
    Neither should one rely solely on government
    to create innovative opportunities. Instead,
    we should watch for those moments
    when crisis, disaster, or strategic vision
    opens a window for securing resources for
    the most promising alternatives.

    Last, it is important to focus on a new
    kind of entrepreneur who complements the
    social entrepreneur: the system entrepreneur.
    The system entrepreneur identifies
    the promising alternatives to the dominant
    approach and then works with networks of
    others to stimulate and take advantage of opportunities
    for scaling up those innovations.
    Working at the level of the whole system, system
    entrepreneurs develop the alternatives,
    attract the resources, and work toward the
    moment when the system tips.

    Go to Source

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    Categories: Social Innovation

    Tags: Barefoot College, resilience theory, social innovation, system entrepreneur

    African Economic Outlook 2013 Innovate and Scale: A Tough Balancing Act

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