Introduction

The term social innovation (SI) has a long and rich history, but only in the last decade has the term become increasingly popular among EU policy makers, practitioners and academics, who view social innovation as a strategy to combat poverty and social exclusion, to promote civil society engagement and to help improve social services. This chapter outlines the history of practices and discourses of social innovation in the EU. It shows how the EU has gradually become more engaged in promoting and supporting socially innovative projects, even attempting to turn social innovation into a top-down policy instrument. As the EU has stepped into the social innovation process, a ‘multi-scalar social innovation system’ (Sabato et al, 2017) has emerged in Europe. By this is meant that social innovations are mostly found at the local level, but are often organised, funded and supported at multiple scales, including the regional, the national and the EU (Jenson and Harrisson, 2013: 20). To conceptualise local social innovation in Europe thus requires an understanding of the multi-scalar social innovation system and how it came about.

This chapter discusses the historical roots of social innovation in Europe and analyses how it evolved from a grassroots model of social action in the 1970s into a crucial dimension in official EU policy making during the Barroso Commission (2004‒14). It assesses how the notion of social innovation has been used to creatively combine apparently contradictory policy goals within the Europe 2020 Strategy, such as poverty reduction on the one hand and competitiveness on the other. It thus analyses how EU institutions have shaped the meaning and content of social innovation over time.

This work is mainly based on careful desk research, which encompasses documents produced by EU bodies, especially the European Commission, ‘grey’ literature and insights from the relevant scientific literature. In addition, six semi-structured interviews with well-informed actors were held between October 2014 and January 2015. It starts with three sections, which roughly correspond to the main periods of the European social innovation system. This chronological approach allows us to situate social innovation developments within the broader policy framework of the EU’s overarching strategies: the re-launched Lisbon Strategy (2006‒10) and the Europe 2020 initiative (2010, ongoing).