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Social Innovation in Latin America

Social innovation is on the rise in Latin America. It can be generally understood as the region’s creative response to immense social problems and societal challenges, such as low quality of health care and education as well as poverty, which affect large parts of the population and have not been successfully addressed by governments. While in a number of countries economic growth helped reduce poverty, it did not necessarily lead to more equality. Latin America remains the region with the highest income inequality in the world (Bernal 2015). Hence, social innovation can be seen as part of various approaches within modern development theories that criticize narrow economic concepts of human development (Millard 2014). In this context, the capability approach, based on the philosophical works of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum is particularly relevant (Nicholls and Ziegler 2015). As a normative and application-oriented analytical framework that focuses on the opportunity and ability for a good, successful life as well as the measurement of welfare and quality of life, it offers important points of reference for social innovation research and practice. Despite the increasing importance of social innovation in Latin America, the body of literature on this topic is still very limited and research remains scarce (Domanski et al. 2016). There is a need for a systematic approach that would better explore the ways social innovation is understood in Latin America, what drives it and which are the barriers for its development. A detailed look at the roles and functions of different societal sectors is also required. It would help to answer the question, what would social innovation policy look like in order for it to achieve broader attention and impact. Currently, social innovation in Latin America remains an area chiefly dependent on the strong involvement of NGOs and communities. The report “From social innovation to public policy” (Rey de Marulanda and Tancredi 2010) by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) gives important insights into the development of social innovation in the region, providing a lot of entirely new information on numerous initiatives in different fields. It has been a milestone in making social innovation visible as an important issue in Latin America.