Scaling Across Communities: A Configurational Approach

Abstract

While community social innovation has been suggested as an important means to overcome regulatory and market failures in the transition to renewable energy, it is by design limited in scale. To truly represent a solution to large-scale sustainability problems, community-based innovations need to be diffused and adopted across communities. Leveraging practice diffusion research and the empirical example of the bioenergy-village concept in Germany, we investigate how the interplay of fit (between the diffusing community social innovation and the adopting community) and opportunities for adaptation enables successful adoption. Conducting configurational analysis, we identify four equifinal combinations of conditions that contribute to successful adoption and thus diffusion of community social innovation. Across these combinations, our results highlight the importance of fit. Moreover, we find that an initial fit needs to be combined with opportunities for adaptation, while financial resources only play a minor role in adoption success.