The MLP provides a pragmatic starting-point for an integrated framework since it is well-established and has proven useful for studying the relationship between social innovations and systemic change. I further extend this framework by focusing on the emerging literature on grassroots innovations and integrate these perspectives with the free social space literature. Thus, the notion of social innovation is here broadened to include also non-technical solutions and processes, and the concept of niches is translated to free social spaces. The new, synthetic theoretical framework is illustrated in Fig. 1.
To concretize and illustrate the framework throughout the text, I use the APPO-movement (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca) in Mexico in 2006 as an empirical example. This movement is particularly interesting since it is a typical example of a grassroots-based social mobilization that (partly) led to a bottom-up societal transition, characterized by novel political structures and processes. Since the main aim here is to illustrate the applicability of the conceptual framework, the empirical case description remains relatively sketchy here.
This section is organized in two parts. First, I introduce the conceptual framework, which is then practically illustrated using the case of APPO. Secondly, I show how these concepts are used and set into motion in order to understand and ultimately to explain transition dynamics, which are finally empirically illustrated through the same case.
Social innovation
First of all, I follow the definition coined by Avelino et al. (2014, p. 16) of social innovation as “new social practices, comprising new ideas, models, rules, social relations and/or services.” This broad definition refers to both new social solutions and to the new processes that are used to arrive at these solutions. Here the term “new” should be understood in terms of a contested novelty—new in relation to the established solutions and processes. In short, it can be understood as changes in “the way of doing things.” Of course, this means that social innovations are not by necessity progressive in any sense; they can just as well be regressive and conservative. As opposed to technical innovations, which have the primary purpose of serving the market, social innovations have a broader purpose—to serve societal needs and to fulfill societal functionalities.
Social innovations emerge when established societal structures and institutions, here referred to as the socio-political regime (see below), are considered not capable of delivering satisfactory solutions to existing social problem such as poverty, exclusion, and segregation. In this context, we may further distinguish between incremental and radical social innovations. The former includes innovations that do not provide any fundamental challenge to the existing regime and also includes, for instance, various political reforms. While such reforms may indeed lead to political changes, they rarely lead to any fundamental changes in the underlying logic of the established regime. Radical social innovations, on the other hand, bear particular potential for transformative rather than incremental changes. These innovations typically exist on the outskirts of dominant institutionalized fields (i.e., the state and market) and often provide a bottom-up challenge to the hegemonic structures of the established regime in the form of how societal needs are addressed, and the processes that are required to arrive at them, including current social relations, dominant coordination mechanisms and institutional configurations (Pel and Bauler 2014).
The socio-political regime
As indicated above, the socio-political regime is defined as the established political system that consists of the prevailing social practices, rules, norms, values, social relations, and political institutions. In this sense, the regime is the level that is replaced during a societal transition. The regime is generally characterized by stability, since the various parts are entrenched within co-dependent relations that lead to lock-in effects and path-dependency. In other words, we get locked-in to the “current ways of doing things,” and certain parts of the regime are often difficult to replace even though they may be suboptimal, because they are deeply connected and embedded within other parts of the regime.
Defining, delineating, and applying the concept of the socio-political regime in an empirical analysis is both an empirical and analytical challenge. The regime is a multi-layered concept and there are no clear-cut distinctions between these layers in reality—political regimes are composite, nested systems and a local government can, for instance, seldom be neatly separated from the national regime since they are often based on relatively similar norms and social practices. Additionally, the concept serves two main analytical functions by i.) fixating the unit that is replaced or altered during a transition in a specific case, and ii.) pinpointing the various mechanisms and factors that may have an impact on such a transition. Thus, by necessity the term cannot be analytically exhaustive, and as I illustrate in the empirical case below, the level or delimitation one chooses for an empirical analysis largely depends on local, specific circumstances and the purpose of the analysis. This requires a pragmatic approach and awareness that certain aspects that are left out when defining the analytical concept in a certain case may still have an important impact in the transition process.
As noted above, incremental social innovations, such as reforms, tend to fit well within an existing regime since they do not radically challenge the underlying logic. Thus, political parties and leaders may often replace each other without any major friction. However, due to various stabilizing mechanism (that I elaborate on below), it is generally difficult to create and establish new, radical social innovations from within the socio-political system. So how do they emerge?
Free social spaces
In the framework suggested here, the importance of free social spaces as the locus of radical social innovations is emphasized and they correspond to the notion of niches. The radical social innovations that grow in these spaces are generally in conflict, or at least incompatible, with the existing regime. These spaces provide an incubation room for new path-breaking social innovations that cannot yet compete with the incumbent political structures and norms that are fully integrated in society. As Smith et al. (2010, p. 440) put it when referring to technical transitions, while “change within the regime tends to be incremental and path-dependent … ‘revolutionary’ change originates in ‘niches.’” These protective spaces thus enable social and political alternatives to grow in performance and legitimacy and to develop new connections and ideas before they can compete in a more open, public way.Footnote 5 It should be noted that these free spaces can come in the form of both physical meeting places such as churches and cafes, but can also be structurally protected free spaces, for instance provided by linguistic codes that are opaque to those in power, which corresponds with Scott’s (1990) notion of hidden transcripts. Finally, such free spaces may also transcend physical spaces, such as in the cases of social media and internet forums.
Based on insights from the transition studies literature and particularly the strategic niche management literature, I argue that free social spaces generally provide three main, interrelated functions (Smith 2006; Smith and Raven 2012). Firstly, they provide what transition scholars refer to as shielding: referring to the processes that hold at bay parts of the selection pressures from mainstream society that allows the innovation to grow. An early innovation can rarely compete on its own, not only because it needs time to grow in efficiency, but also because the mainstream selection pressures are adapted around mainstream artifacts. Within social movements, free social spaces serve as a shelter against both political repression and the hegemonic ideologies of mainstream society.
Secondly, they provide a nurturing function: referring to processes that support the development of radical innovation. In a social movement context this includes two somewhat different processes: i.) the development of collective identities, shared cultural values, and collective-action frames, which affect how we perceive both new and existing problems and their causes and consequences, and ii.) the enabling of a build-up of social networks among actors who are agitating for political alternatives and the coordination of activities based on these emerging alternative rules, norms, and perceptions. In this sense, free spaces generate social relations and connections that people can draw upon to promote collective action. This also includes mobilizing aspects such as developing strategies, sharing information, evaluating tactics, creating campaigns, and training leaders. Much of the focus in transition literature lies in “experiments” as the key for nurturing (Kemp et al. 1998), which has an interesting resonance with social movement theories. Free spaces in social movements are often referred to—in similar terms—as “cultural laboratories”; spaces for experimenting with alternative world views, and “to toy with unconventional ideas and experiment with new roles” (Polletta 1999, p. 23).
Finally, free spaces provide an empowerment function. In transition studies terms, this comes in two forms: empowerment to fit and conform and empowerment to stretch and transform (Smith and Raven 2012). The first makes the innovation competitive with mainstream social and political practices in an unchanged selection environment (i.e., it transforms the innovation to fit into mainstream structures). The latter aims to undermine incumbent regimes and transmit bottom-up derived social innovations into regimes (i.e., to adapt mainstream society to the radical innovation).
In a social movement context, much of the work of revolutionary organizations seems to fulfill the role of stretching and transforming society in a way that enables a more radical transition. This is also one way to understand the role of everyday resistance (Bayat 1997a, b; Scott 1990) in large-scale mobilization—it influences by paving the way for more radical transformation, through undermining legitimacy and creating network ties. Similarly, empowerment to fit in and conform plays a role in the integration of “narratives of change” into mainstream terminology and adapts them for existing institutional structures and the hegemonic order. For instance, activists typically develop common scripts in response to the features of the institutions they confront: to speak to potential recruits, movements may need to use the language of “common sense’” including parts that stand in opposition to their articulated ideology. This relates to the notion of frame alignment (e.g., Snow 2004; Snow and Benford 1988) and is, of course, highly central for organizations that are struggling for societal transformation.
Following the conceptualization of these three main functions, we may conclude that free social spaces can be described as clandestine incubators of revolt where radical social innovations in the form of, for example, new ideas, social practices, resistance repertoires, and conflicting values can grow under the surface, connect to each other, generate support networks, and gain momentum. The main task for the actors within free social spaces is to propagate these social innovations, and they play a central part when such innovations manage to reach a wider audience in the overall society. To understand when such revolutionary events may occur, we need to account for the structural context surrounding social innovations and the role of game-changing events.
Socio-political landscape and game changers
The socio-political landscape is the third heuristic level in the framework and constitutes the broader environment that has an impact on socio-political development. This includes various material/technical, institutional, and social-cultural factors that form a wider and relatively stable structural context for both the regime and free social spaces. Or put differently: landscape refers to the “rules of the game,” and constitutes the patchwork of societal systems in which the socio-political regime is embedded.
There are three important differences in how this concept is defined and used here, compared to the transition studies frameworks.
First, while MLP typically refers to the socio-technical landscape as various inherently exogenous and objective contextual factors (see, e.g., Geels 2005c; Geels and Schot 2007), I believe it is important to acknowledge that these structures and processes do not necessarily exist “out there” as external entities, but are often, consciously or not, co-constructed by actors of change. As social movement scholars have argued for some time in relation to, for example, political opportunity structures (Ferree 2002; Gamson and Meyer 1996; Kurzman 1996), such systemic weaknesses are often difficult to assess objectively through scholarly methods. Rather, the analysis is a matter of interpretation and exploitation by various players in contentious politics (cf. subjective and objective opportunity structures). This means that the level of exogenity and temporal scale may differ across different types of landscape changes: some may be more exogenous than others, and different actors may interpret landscape changes differently. Consequently, the notion of landscape may include a variety of phenomena that are fundamentally different in kind, ranging from relatively objective and undisputable contextual developments like declining oil reserves and climate change, to more discursively constructed factors like ideology and cultural beliefs. However, they are united in that they refer to trends at the macro-level that are beyond the immediate reach of individual practices.
This brings us to a second important difference. While material, political, and institutional aspects of landscapes are well-developed in the MLP, the socio-cultural aspects have remained largely under-theorized. This may not be very surprising considering that the focus of transition studies has been on technological innovations and most attention has consequently been on various “hard” factors such as material infrastructure and the entrenchment with other artifacts. Thus, while more “soft” factors such as culture and ideology undoubtedly also matter in the context of technological innovation, these factors have arguably an even more decisive role when it comes to social innovations.
Broadly speaking, cultural power describes the collection of established world views, beliefs, assumptions, and values in society that help defining the boundaries of common-sense “reality,” either by ignoring views outside those boundaries or by labeling deviant opinions “irrational,” “unrealistic,” “tasteless,” or “irresponsible” (Lears 1985, p. 572). As such, cultural aspects are central in preserving and reproducing dominant institutions in society by justifying, legitimizing, and normalizing the existing institutions.
These factors are hard to place comfortably within any of the analytical levels in the framework. They are often simultaneously part of the broader selection environment that socio-political regimes and free social space actors must relate to, but at the same time they are also a central aspect of established regimes, constituting entrenched sociocultural arrangements that, similar to, e.g., material infrastructure in the case of technological systems, make novelties hard to introduce. After all, established worldviews, beliefs, and values are often what free space actors are up against and what they ultimately aim to replace with something different.
But while the relation between regimes and landscape is undeniably complex, it is nonetheless necessary to keep them analytically apart in order to study the relation between them. Existing regimes necessarily relate to and adapt to the set of (typically) slowly changing, dominant discourses and cultural beliefs in society, and in turn carry out institutional practices that reinforce and reproduce these discourses. For instance, liberal democracy and the notion of property rights are ideological beliefs that are well-established in most western countries and thus constitute a slowly changing and relatively exogenous context that is both upheld by and serves to legitimize political regimes. In this sense, it is not a linear but circular interaction between regime and landscape, as culture and hegemonic ideologies are typically embedded in institutional practices.
Accordingly, powerful and established groups have a lasting influence on the shape and meaning of culture in society at large, and it is generally in their interest to retain status quo and reproduce hegemonic cultural norms and ideologies since these are typically aligned with the interests of the established regime. However, as Weber (1978) noted, while these ideas was originally created to serve the powerful, they may come to have a life on their own, constraining rulers as well as those they rule and forcing elites to preserve their legitimacy by relating to these ideas. Thus, the dominant culture has elements that serve existing power relations and those that subvert them.
This implies that there is a certain ambiguity at play here. On the one hand, dominant culture and established political regimes tend to be relatively stable due to the entrenchment of beliefs, ideologies, worldviews and practices, and the fact that institutions and various material factors provide a relatively solid foundation for social patterns to lean on (Elder-Vass 2017). Cultural hegemony thus sets the boundaries of permissible discourse and discourages the clarification of social alternatives. But on the other hand, culture is not a static, unified system, but complex and partly contradicting processes, often riddled with gaps and inconsistencies that may create friction between the regime and the landscape. For instance, various societal processes such as growing class divisions and ethnic segregation may challenge and undermine the idea of liberal property rights. This means that there are always, to some extent, tensions and stress in the dominant order. Cultural hegemony can thus be understood as “a process of continuous creation which, given its massive scale, is bound to be uneven in the degree of legitimacy it commands and to leave some room for antagonistic cultural expressions to develop” (Adamson 1983, p. 174).
Returning to the notion of free social spaces, this conceptualization of the landscape further accentuates that free spaces do not only constitute a shelter against physical repression, but also a space for “dreams of possibilities that lie outside political discourse” (Mukerji 2014, p. 349). Activists in these spaces thus “struggle against pre-existing cultural and institutional narratives and the structures of meaning power they convey” (Davis 2012, p. 25) partly through the construction of embryonic counter-cultures that violate the hegemonic cultural order and the prevailing common sense. In this sense, the line between dominant and subordinate cultures is a permeable membrane, not an impenetrable barrier, and the relative openness of the cultural context differs from case to case.
Third and more specifically, I find the complementing notion of “game changers” (Avelino et al. 2014) as useful in empirical analyses of social mobilizations. This notion refers to specific events that are perceived to change drastically the selection environment (i.e., alter the “rules of the game”). Often, but not necessarily, these game changers embody landscape developments, in the sense that pressure from the landscape finds a concrete expression through a specific event that is perceived, interpreted, and co-constructed by actors and stakeholders who draw upon these events in order to pursue their own agenda. These actors can be both regime actors defending the establishment and radical actors within free spaces fighting for new societal configurations. Often, these groups have different and directly opposing narratives of these events.
A typical example of a game changer is police repression: when a longstanding culture of systematic political repression culminates in a specific event of violent repression (which is narrated and framed by actors who are critical of the regime as a symbol of the broader repressive culture). In this sense, while the specific event may be performed by regime actors (e.g., the police), it may connect with and represent broader landscape developments. Other examples include the environmental crisis, the economic crisis, but also rumors and symbolic events that may trigger large-scale mobilizations. In this sense, this concept is related to della Porta’s (2018) notion of “signals,” which indicates perceived cracks and vulnerabilities in the regime, thus providing windows of opportunities that movements may exploit. The close interconnection between such game changing events and how they are interpreted and exploited by free space actors is illustrated by the arrow going in both directions in Fig. 1. This relationship is of course reciprocal: major external events and certain landscape changes may also have a strong impact on existing movement discourses and narratives. An example would be when discourses that have existed for decades are triggered by events such as the financial crisis, thus provoking revitalized interests in these narratives.