IPPA (International Public Policy Assocation) has opened the call for paper for their 2021 conference to be held in Barcelona (6-8 July 2021). In partcular, Raquel Gallego-Calderón and Lara Maestripieri are organising a session on
Linking social innovation and empowerment: A public policy role?
The session is developed around the following research questions
- How can public policy enhance citizens’ collective and individual capabilities to promote social innovation?
- Is public policy intervention a contradiction in terminis with the aims and means of social innovation?
- What can public policy learn from social innovation?
The session welcomes papers investigating the relation between social innovation and public policies, in particular those exploring the potential beneficial spillover over policy learning and which type of institutional context is favourable to social innovation. We also welcome papers on how public policy may promote social innovation without compromising either its social or its innovation dimensions, but avoiding, at the same time, adverse consequences such as the reproductions of inequality structures. In particular, we would like to assess the capacity of social innovation to empower women and promote diversity, using an intersectional analytical framework in which gender is only one (intersecting) axes of inequality, which is inseparable from other potential structures of inequality. As per intersectionality theory, gender, age, social class, ethnicity, locality and other statuses are not only closely tied to each other but also cumulative over the life course. Social innovation is in theory capable to intercept the complexities of social needs more easily than public policies as its scopes and goals are defined in a bottom-up process of negotiating among participants and beneficiaries. We are particularly interested in research that explores to what extent social innovation is able to acknowledge the co-existence of multiple forms of disadvantage across women and its capacity to scale up through the leverage of public policies.
Organisers welcome all approaches – theoretical and empirical, substantive and methodological, micro and macro, qualitative and quantitative, as well as geographically specific research or comparative studies-.
The call for papers is open until 29 January 2021.
For more information and to submist abstracts, please, check the conference website: https://www.ippapublicpolicy.org/conference/icpp5-barcelona-2021/panel-list/13#topic106
