Abstract
Responding to a number of longstanding challenges such as poverty, wide-ranging inequalities, environmental problems, and migration, requires new and creative responses that are often not provided by traditional governments. Social innovations can offer socio-ecological and economic solutions by introducing new practices that reduce social inequalities, disproportionate resource use and foster sustainable development. Understanding the role of social innovations is especially complicated in unstable institutional environments, e.g. in developing countries and countries in transition. This paper analyses nine social innovations in rural areas in Serbia, based on in-depth interviews and document analysis. This analysis reveals factors that facilitate or constrain social innovations whilst simultaneously identifying related formal and informal institutional voids, for example, poor law enforcement, a lack of adequate infrastructure, lack of trust, as well as norms and values that bolster patriarchal systems. The results that emerged from this research show that social innovations are operating in spite of these challenges and are facilitating improvements in a number of the aforementioned challenging areas. Some innovators engage in social entrepreneurship activities because of subsistence-oriented goals, while others follow idealistic or life-style oriented goals, thus creating new social values. Moving beyond these observations, this paper also identifies means to overcome institutional voids, such as creation of context-specific organisational structures, improved legal frameworks, and innovative financial mechanisms.
Highlights
Societies around the world are facing a great number of complex and longstanding challenges such as poverty, hunger, increasing inequalities in different spheres of life, environmental challenges, and unprecedented levels of migration [1]
This study focuses on institutional settings that are of relevance for various types of social innovations and enterprises within the Serbian context
This paper focuses on the identification of institutional voids, which are revealed by looking at hindering factors and identified needs
Summary
Societies around the world are facing a great number of complex and longstanding challenges such as poverty, hunger, increasing inequalities in different spheres of life, environmental challenges, and unprecedented levels of migration [1]. It is becoming increasingly apparent that solutions for such pressing problems cannot be addressed solely by traditional governmental approaches as they are not delivering the required policy results [2] This weakening of state capacity to deal with these issues has been accompanied by evolution within civil society that has seen the emergence of new citizen-actors and new forms of mobilisations [2] which find innovative ways to fill these capacity shortfalls. The existence of institutional voids means that an institutional framework necessary to guide and support the proper functioning of activities within a given context is absent, weak or deficient [3,4] Such voids stem from information problems as well as misguided and inefficient regulatory implementation mechanisms [3], but may include the lack or failure of informal institutions [5]. The widespread poverty and social problems, together with limited support from both the private and the public sector, has created a need for innovative models that could support recovery and growth, bringing further economic reform and positive social change [59]
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