Social Innovations for Sustainable Consumption – a Typology for Their Political Promotion and Further Development

The current political debate in Europe ascribes importance to social innovations in regard to the transformation toward a sustainable society. Social innovation refers to utterly diverse phenomenon like citizen’s communities, cooperatives, transition towns and intercultural gardens, new forms of participation as well as user- and consumer-driven innovations. In regard to consumption there is the hope that carbon-intensive and non-sustainable patterns will be transformed towards more sustainable practices. However it is often not clear how to understand the term social innovation – most definition-esteems fall short because they are not different from usual economic definitions or rely on an obsolete idea of technique trying to mark a difference between social and technical innovation. Before looking at sustainable consumption one has to answer questions about the meaning of social innovations, which are the criteria for the observation and analysis of diverse innovative consumption phenomenons.

These questions are currently investigated by the project “Sustainable consumption by social innovation. Concepts and practice” funded by the German Federal Ministry of Environment and the Federal Environment Agency. Hereby 50 cases of social innovations within several consumption fields are closely investigated.

This paper presents considerations on the understanding of social innovation as the base for a typology of social innovations for sustainable consumption, which will be introduced. Social innovations are understood as novel social practices which differ from former routines, constitute solutions for social problems, and entail far reaching structural changes in society. Beside these structural effects of social innovations one has to consider the dynamic of change processes to make up criteria. An essential result of the analysis is the identification of five types of social innovations (do-it-together, strategic consumption, community based consumption, do-it-yourself, new offers for consumption), which are the basis for political intended promotion strategies and strategies for further development of the change agents.