Social Innovation (or Why We Need the Civil Society)

Activities enacted by economic and governmental actors at various levels will not be sufficient to achieve the necessary turnaround of our consumption patterns and economic systems. What is needed instead are orchestrated, multilevel, and possibly cross-sectoral approaches that offer new solutions to the grand challenges we currently face. There is growing recognition among scholars that civil society plays an important role in addressing so-called "wicked" social, economic, and environmental problems. In this chapter, we discuss the concept of social innovation, how it can be put into practice, and how it can be scaled.