This article aims to analyze the role of civil society organizations and their inter-institutional relations in social innovation initiatives. To this end, a qualitative, descriptive, and exploratory case study was carried out in the Articulation of the Semi-Arid (ASA), and as units of analysis, civil society organizations (CSO) linked to ASA were investigated. The results demonstrate that the CSOs plays the role of representing civil society in a democratic perspective, expressing its interests and values. It is noticed that the State is no longer the only agent responsible for the elaboration of public policies focusing on the primary needs of the population, allowing a bottom-up articulation process. In their involvement with institutional actors, the CSO plays the role of legitimizing their choices, enforcing contractual relations, and articulating the financing of social innovation initiatives. The importance of CSO for the promotion of collective actions is evident, in the search for social transformation.
O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar o papel das organizações da sociedade civil e suas relações interinstitucionais nas iniciativas de inovação social. Para tanto, realizou-se um estudo de caso de natureza qualitativa, descritiva e exploratória na Articulação do Semiárido (ASA) e como unidades de análise, investigou-se as organizações da sociedade civil (OSC) vinculadas à ASA. Os resultados demonstram que as OSC desempenham os papéis de representar a sociedade civil em uma perspectiva democrática, expressando seus interesses e valores. Percebe-se que o Estado deixa de ser o único agente responsável pela elaboração de políticas públicas com foco nas principais necessidades da população, permitindo um processo de articulação bottom-up. No envolvimento com os atores institucionais, as OSC desempenham o papel de legitimação de suas escolhas; fazendo-se cumprir as relações contratuais e articulam o financiamento das iniciativas de inovação social. Evidencia-se a importância das OSC para a promoção de ações coletivas, na busca da transformação social.
Social innovation initiatives stem from the awareness of a specific territory as a space marked by economic, cultural, and environmental needs not satisfied by the economic-oriented development model (ARAÚJO; OLIVEIRA; CORREIA, 2021). Thus, a paradigmatic shift emerges from the social relations built between actors, allowing the territory to be a space of potentialities, articulations, and mobilizations to form responses in relation to those realities and social challenges, and play decisive roles in local development (LUBELCOVÁ, 2012; MACCALLUM, 2009; MOULAERT, 2013; SOUZA; LESSA; SILVA FILHO, 2019) incorporated into key sectors such as health, education, and social assistance.
The actors involved in this process must focus on initiatives that promote asocietal transformation, acting as participative individuals by proposing specific policies aimed at changing the social, economic, institutional, ecological, and cultural imbalances they face and that enable new opportunities for human development (KLEIN et al., 2012). Through their participation, social innovation initiatives are linked to the concepts of social transformation, new economic objective creation, and regulation, environmental protection, a new role played in the political sphere, decentralization, and cooperation amongst social actors and other actors (AVELINO et al., 2019; KLEIN; TREMBLAY, 2013; PEL et al., 2019).
Within this context, civil society organizations (CSOs) play an outstanding role in the social innovation process, developing roles that can help identify social needs developing the social innovation implementation process up to its consolidation (CORREIA; OLIVEIRA; GOMEZ, 2016). In this way, social innovation focuses on practices that promote the development of the individuals' creative capacity, collective action and macro-structural dynamics (CAJAIBA-SANTANA, 2014; LEHTOLA; STÅHLE, 2014; SGARAGLI, 2014), causing civil society organizations to become involved in the social transformation process, through the cooperation between the involved actors, and in the formalization of social partnerships or networks, as well as contributing to the government and co-producing or co-creating public policies, promoting improvements and reducing costs in public services (ANDION; MORAES; GONSALVES, 2017).
Given what was presented, this article aims to analyze the role of civil society organizations and their inter-institutional relations in social innovation initiatives. This work reveals the results of the Articulation of the Semi-Arid (ASA) analysis. ASA operates in the Northeastern Brazilian states, as an “emblematic” organization of Brazilian civil society that promotes social innovation initiatives that express the active and pro-positive action of society in a political context, in protest against the persistence of severesocioeconomic and environmental problems.
Despite the increase in the number of studies on social innovation in recent years (ADRO; FERNANDES, 2020; EDWARDS-SCHACHTER; WALLACE, 2017), there is still a gap in studies about social innovation initiatives’ potential of helping to promote their ecosystems in specific contexts (PEL et al., 2019, 2019; SOUZA; LESSA; SILVA FILHO, 2019). Therefore, it is necessary to understand the role of CSOs in their respective cultural and socioeconomic contexts by identifyingelements that can operationalize new forms of organization, products, services, and social practices.
This article intends to advance the understanding of the existing relationsbetween actors directly involved in the development of social innovation initiatives, including the potential role of stimulating the promotion of public policies to promote social change. This way, it can contribute as a guiding instrument for managers’ decision-making, helping them better understand the specifics of the social context they experience.
In structural terms, in addition to this introduction, section two presents the theoretical perspective of social innovation. In the third section, the methodology adopted to carry out this study is described. Afterwards, the results are presented, and at the end, the authors' final considerations are discussed.
In recent decades, social innovation has positioned itself within an agenda and within programs that comply with the ability to solve social, economic, environmental, and institutional problems through a societal transformation in its different sectors (public, private, social, educational, among others) (PORTALES, 2019). This capacity can generate social change sustainably, and it increases society's need to address the problems humanity faces at the global level, which have the most evident consequences in developing countries.
Thus, the social innovation concept emerges in convergence with the search for new ways to coordinate and mobilize global and local problems, reflected in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (PORTALES, 2019). Therefore, social innovation refers to the cooperation between the social actors involved in the creation, production, and dissemination of innovation, so it’s emergence is the result of the creation of multidisciplinary teams, their learning process for the acquisition of knowledge, changes in representations, new learning, and collaboration (CLOUTIER, 2003; SGARAGLI, 2014).
The creation of these new social relationships supports individual and collectivized mediation, conceived not only to solve social problems but also to respond to a social ideal. As the network of social actors restructuring takes place, a redefinition of cultural orientations is brought about, which formalizes the adoption of the new management of social relations (LALLEMAND, 2001) and redirects the establishment of new ways of doing things, whether through the development of new services, processes, products, or new forms of organization of social relations (PEL et al., 2018).
It is necessary to consider that the conditions for the emergence of social innovation lie in the combination of factors that enable the emergence of synergy between different actors involved in innovative projects. Therefore, the fundamental characteristic of social innovations is the presence of actors from different sectors of society and at different levels (DOMANSKI, 2018; SOUZA; LESSA; SILVA FILHO, 2019).
Social innovation is mainly located in the third sector. However, it can also be present in public policies and in the social responsibility actions of private companies (ANDRÉ; ABREU, 2006). However, from the New Economic Sociology’s perspective and its break with the economic paradigm, the tendency is for social innovation to emerge outside institutions as the result of mobilization around a goal led by civil society (ARAÚJO; OLIVEIRA; CORREIA, 2021; CORREIA; OLIVEIRA; GOMEZ, 2016).
The CSOs capacity for innovation consists in linking social objectives with economic and business approaches, being able to promote social entrepreneurship initiatives, helping to identify products and services, in market analysis to identify potential customers, and in the ability to manage and create a cooperation network (GABRIELA, 2012). Therefore, CSOs play the role of envisioning how social innovations are developed, implemented, and disseminated. One of the main aspects to be observed is that the social innovation initiatives envisage the adoption of mobilization and community involvement strategies in the process of change as central, assuming broad social participation of CSOs from the preparation of a local diagnosis to the formulation, implementation, and monitoring of actions (CORREIA; MELO; OLIVEIRA, 2019; MORAES; ANDION, 2017).
Social innovation involves new solutions that meet a social need by articulatingactors that allow the achievement of a social result. Thus, thinking about civil society involvement within the concept of social innovation is to understand how these actors articulate and how they can get involved in the process of developing new solutions to social challenges (CORREIA; MELO; OLIVEIRA, 2019; MAGLIOCCA et al., 2016).
Within the presented relations, the involvement of social actors’ will depend on how they relate to the satisfaction of unmet needs, with the involvement of existing governance mechanisms, with their level of articulation, learning, and empowerment (AVELINO et al., 2019; BEPA, 2010), as well as the reality of the social context.
This refers directly to civil society’s strategic role in the search for therealization of participatory democracy, expressed in the creation of public spaces and the engagement of civil society itself in the processes of discussion and decision-making related to social issues and public policies (TEIXEIRA; DAGNINO; SILVA, 2002; YANG; HOLGAARD, 2012). Therefore, civil society plays a fundamental role in any society that holds everyone responsible for their actions, that is driven by the search for social transformation, which pursues equity and justice, human rights for all, preservation of the environment and natural resources; it reflects and defends the dignity of all people (SOMMERFELDT, 2013).
This approach results from the comprehensive and integrated understanding that these initiatives encompass all sectors of society and their actors in different research areas and application fields, thus demonstrating that broadening the perspective is crucial for understanding social innovation (BJÖRK et al., 2014; POLESE et al., 2018; REY-GARCIA; CALVO; MATO-SANTISO, 2019).
The creators or promoters of this type of change are social innovators and may come from the private, public, and social sectors (BAKKER et al., 2013; PORTALES, 2019). These sources are classified according to the actor or sector that implements them. They do not act in isolation and can be complemented by their resources and mandates, as well as articulated among themselves in the interest of achieving the social objective (ANDION; ALPERSTEDT; GRAEFF, 2020; PORTALES, 2019).
Thus, to foster social innovation, identifying the main actors, relationships, and causal relationships that allow new social practices to emerge and spread to establish a new regular practice (TSAKANIKA, 2017) from partnerships is suggested. Due to the fact that the central objective of intersectoral partnerships is considered to be solving economic, social, and environmental problems by combining the capacities and resources of organizational actors in different sectors (VAN TULDER et al., 2016; VOLTAN; DE FUENTES, 2016).
It is in this context that the social innovation ecosystems approach emerges to reflect the structures of both the collaboration dynamics and the agility of the involved actors with a shared objective of social transformation.
They are defined from a multitude of actors and organizations that together form social initiatives (Pel et al., 2018) with legal and cultural norms, support infrastructure, and many other elements (CHUERI; VASCONCELOS; DOS SANTOS, 2019) that allow a movement of meta-governance (SCHUBERT, 2018).
In this way, the third sector finds its form of collective articulation as a legitimate actor in defense of interests. It is configured in civil society organizations, situated between the market and the State, acting collectively.
In addition, the CSOs articulate to establish new forms of cooperation suited to the desired social objectives. Collaboration emerges from the participation between same-sector organizations that seek to meet the needs of a given community in the pursuit of improving living conditions, thus forming a set of guidelines for co-creative processes based on collaboration networks that serve to create new knowledge through a learning perspective (ZIEGLER, 2017).
Therefore, civil society encompasses a range of operational and human associative activities in the public sphere outside the State, aimed at the organized citizens’ aspirations, united by common interests, objectives, values, or traditions, mobilized for collective action, either as beneficiaries or as actors in the development process.
CSOs have sought to develop participatory solutions to social issues, prompting a proactive response to the role played by the public sector through the implementation of new internal participatory processes that change the way in which actors interact and by providing regulatory and financial frameworks necessary for the dissemination of social innovations (BEPA, 2010; HOWALDT; DOMANSKI; KALETKA, 2016).
Thus, social innovation in the public sphere offers spaces for various actors and instances to intervene on the same public problem, requiring them to provide new responses and solutzions and new ways of executing them through communication and cooperation (GORDON; BECERRA; FRESSOLI, 2017; MORAES; ANDION, 2017).
Social innovation initiatives often maintain an unstable relationship with public actors. Due to them being based on precarious and temporary cooperation arrangements, difficulties in getting involved with institutional governance structures arise. Initiatives are also characterized by solid and formal tiesbetween actors (social, private, public, and third sector) and between different scales of the governance structure (MOULAERT et al., 2010). These actors are involved as co-producers of public policies, contributing to the success of initiatives through their ability to participate in complex networks of different actors.
Social innovation comes from creativity stimulated by an interaction caused by differences, such as different forms of culture, different social disciplines, and different social sectors (private, public, and civic). A creative act, generated by social actors, can result in the innovation of a new form of integration, depending on the element that is being incorporated and on the context in which it will be used (GABRIELA, 2012; VAN TULDER et al., 2016).
The construction of partnerships between these actors is pointed out by Teodósio (2011) as a perspective for social policy management modernization, arising from the traditional political institutions’ legitimacy crisis, the new relationships between the market and society spheres, and the risk and urgency notion in solving social interest problems.
It should be noted that effective change only happens when new ways of acting and perceiving the world are shared and established by actors through engagement and training strategies to transform the acquired information into action, and then to generate and share more information between members of the social group (ARNIANI et al., 2014).
Social innovation requires greater actor participation, resource sharing, and the dissemination of innovation through education, training, and knowledge in order to generate social transformations through new forms of social relationships or ties, formed over a period of time. (LI; SUN; LIN, 2012; ROLLIN; VINCENT, 2007).
Based on what has been presented, the interinstitutional articulation roles proposed in this article incorporate a new combination in business models inserted in social contexts through the partnership between market, State, and civil society. These partnerships draw attention to the permanent need for decision-making by the actors involved through choices that focus on action subject to the specific context of change.
To achieve the objective, a pragmatic approach that, as a conception, arises more from actions, situations, and consequences than from antecedent conditions were adopted, seeking to understand the complexity (CRESWELL; CRESWELL, 2017) of the aspects involved in the development and implementation of social innovation initiatives.
The research is descriptive and exploratory, adopting a qualitative approach to deepen the case study.
The Articulation of the Semi-Arid’s selection as the case study for this research happened because it was considered an initiative that follows the practice of local development; also for being based on behavior and organizational structures change patterns; for having as its objective the creation of means of social inclusion; for introducing something new to your region that is considered a social innovation; and for having the active participation of civil society.
In order to respond to this study’s objective regarding the roles of society organizations and their interinstitutional relations, all civil society organizations accredited to the ASA state coordinations operating in the states of Paraíba (PB), Rio Grande do Norte (RN), and Pernambuco (PE) were considered as potential units of analysis, totaling 49 representations. That said, emails were sent to all representatives requesting an interview, according to their availability. At first, responses were obtained from 12 CSOs, in which the interviews were carried out. During the interview, the coordinator was asked to indicate other organizations to compose the research. The number of respondents was defined when the roles identified in the study reached the appropriate saturation point to meet the research objectives (FONTANELLA et al., 2011; MINAYO, 2017), totaling 18 (eighteen) social subjects, represented by the coordinators of the CSOs.
The CSOs registered with ASA have, as a common foundation, the commitment to the needs, potentials, and interests of the local populations of that territory, in particular family farmers, which includes issues related to conservation, sustainable use, and environmental restoration of its natural resources, as well as the breaking of access to land, water, and other means of production monopolies.
As a data collection strategy, data and evidence of different natures were used: bibliographic research as a way to obtain a theoretical basis for the construction of the dimensions of analysis and their roles in social innovation initiatives; documental research to gather necessary data and information about the objects of study, such as regulations, rules, procedures, newsletters, and books published by the organizations; field research consolidated by semi-structured interviews with the subjects; and non-participant observation through visits and experience with organizations during the research period.
The semi-structured interview script was constructed according to the literature review, and the following questions were taken into account: Who are those interested in social innovation initiatives? What are the mechanisms used by the CSO for the involvement of other actors? How is the articulation between the CSO and the other actors?
In this sense, the triangulation between the data collection instruments was performed in order to increase the reliability of the research (YIN, 2015), using data collection multimedia.
Data analysis aims to organize and interpret the data in such a way as to enable the achievement of the proposed objectives. Thus, the data treatment was based on content analysis (BARDIN, 2011) to identify the relations between the categories identified in the literature and the interviews carried out with the actors.
To carry out the analysis of the interviews, the qualitative research software ATLAS.ti was used as a support tool, which aims to facilitate qualitative analysis and present flexibility for data generation.
4 Analysis of the role of CSOs and their Interinstitutional Relations in Social Innovation Initiatives
ASA stands out for its efforts to promote rural development in the Brazilian semiarid region. They are recognized for the achievement of the Training and Social Mobilization Program for Coexistence with the Semi-arid, which comprises a set of procedural training and family mobilization actions and associative organizations to live with the semi-arid region.
Its main objective is to trigger discussion processes and involve families in promoting the construction of cisterns and small water infrastructure for producing food, capturing and storing rainwater; water that will be used for domestic consumption and production during the dry season, thus ensuring, in a complementary way, food security and sovereignty for rural families.
Therefore, it promotes and disseminates these social innovations focused on the semi-arid region, discussing and organizing new public policy options aimed at expanding access to water for low-income families in the region, as well as actions directed at the production of food for self-consumption, to guarantee food security and sovereignty.
Currently, ASA represents more than 700 civil society organizations located in the Brazilian semiarid region. In this way, social innovation causes registered civil society organizations to focus on improvements in specific locations via their involvement in the process of social transformation, through cooperation between the actors involved, and in the formalization of networks or social partnerships.
ASA is recognized for the Training and Social Mobilization Program for Coexistence with the Brazilian semiarid region. The main objective of this program is to trigger discussion processes and involve families in promoting the construction of cisterns and small water infrastructure for food production, the capture and storage of rainwater that is used for domestic consumption and agricultural production in the dry period, guaranteeing, in a complementary way, the food security and sovereignty of rural families.
The program develops two projects, the One Million Cisterns Program (P1MC), which provides for the construction of one million cisterns to store rainwater for human consumption, and the One Land, Two Waters Program (P1+2), which encourages the implementation of social technologies aimed at using water for the production of food – “calçadão” cisterns5, stone tanks, infrastructure that support the strengthening of the water structure, and food and nutritional security of families and communities of family farmers. The methodology adopted by the two programs is based on a process of training, exchanges of experiences in the construction of cisterns, and small water infrastructure for food production, plus the implementation of equipment to subtract groundwater in shallow wells for animal watering.
As for those interested in the investigated social initiatives, referred to in this article as "actors", and the articulation that occurs between them for the emergence of the social innovation process, it was found that it is based, on the one hand, on the engagement of social actors involved in the context of living with the drought, mobilizing, through collective actions, in the search for new interaction practices with the public sector; and, on the other hand, in the recognition and financing of the State in the Federal, State and Municipal spheres. Thus, for the execution of the social innovation programs promoted by ASA, several actors were implemented and mobilized, namely: family farmers, beneficiaries of the programs (social actors); civil society organizations linked to ASA, executing the programs (organizational actors); and the State, in its three spheres, which generate resources to make these programs viable (institutional actors).
It was found that ASA is strategically positioned in the social innovation ecosystem. Due to the absence of State participation, new forms of collective action were developed in small rural communities. Thus, the formation of family farmers’ associations or cooperatives was promoted in order to generate recognition by the State in seeing their social needs, and so to promoteautonomy concerning political parties and local politicians.
The data collected by the survey provide subsidies for the representation of the dynamics of CSO’s role and its involvement in relation to other actors involved with the ASA. The analyzes turn to the following sections: involvement with social actors; engagement with institutional actors; cooperation between all involved, including, in the latter, the involvement with other organizational actors.
In addition to the semi-structured interviews based on the theoretical scope to be explored, documentary research was carried out, using documents from the official website of the network mentioned above, multimedia presentations, and relevant legislation. With this in mind, enough data was collected to discuss the processes of each category of analysis, immersed in the discussions. Both elements are described from the code networks generated by the ATLAS.ti software.
Thus, the subjects' speeches and information from supplementary documents compose the analysis presented below. In citation networks, the numbers shown correspond, respectively, to the number of mentions of the code referred to and to its density and do not imply the analysis.