Introduction

Social innovation in most cases implies the introduction and mobilisation of new actors, resources and/or approaches within specific fields of social action (for example housing, inclusive education and labour market activation) to address unmet needs and tackle complex societal challenges (BEPA, 2011; Oosterlynck et al, 2019). Social innovation thus adds to what Kazepov refers to as the horizontal dimension of welfare state restructuring, in which the welfare mixes of actors and the resources they mobilise to provide social services are changing through an increasing involvement of various for-profit and civil society actors and the approaches they typically pursue (Ascoli and Ranci, 2002; Kazepov, 2008, 2010). These evolutions give rise to the question of why new actors, resources and/or approaches are introduced, which forms and strategies of governance are adopted to organise and steer these transformed welfare mixes and what the specific role of different types of public actors and resources in these changing welfare mixes is (Seeleib-Kaiser, 2008: 217‒21). Changing welfare mixes and the governance of various actors, instruments and resources are therefore key concerns for social innovation research. These issues can be analysed on the macro-level of welfare regimes (both local and national) or referring to specific fields of social action within them, but equally so on the micro-level of specific social actions and initiatives and the networks of organisations and institutions that are behind them. This chapter focuses on the micro-level of changing welfare mixes in social innovation initiatives and actions and their governance. (Chapter 3 does not address welfare mixes as directly as is the case in this chapter, but deals with some of these issues on the macro-level of welfare regimes and their overall social policy orientations.) It adopts a broad, institutionalist view on social innovation initiatives and actions and therefore explicitly includes the broader organisational networks and institutional configurations in which these initiatives and actions are embedded and which are included in the empirical focus as an inherent part of the social innovation dynamics.