How Could We Study Climate-Related Social Innovation? Applying Deleuzean Philosophy to the Transition Towns

Abstract

This paper explores the contribution that the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze might offer to researchers studying social innovation in response to climate change. Since the publication of the Stern Report it has been recognized that climate change requires major changes to the way our economy is organized, but it also requires significant social and behavioral change. Can this be usefully viewed through the prism of theories of social innovation? How might such social innovation affect the life chances of the socially excluded and to what extent does it, therefore, offer a space for radical social change? The Transition Towns — a community movement in response to climate change — is used as a test-case of these ideas.