Introduction

Social innovation has been understood predominantly as a local phenomenon by most of the scholars investigating it. The emphasis on the local as the locus of social innovation and on bottom-up dynamics as the modus of social innovation, however, entails manifold risks for both social research and action. Our research question is whether the assumption that all social needs are better met at the local level is overstated, as is the potential of local agency in addressing structural global processes of social exclusion. The same question can be posed about the assumption that other (higher) spatial, institutional and political levels are hostile to social innovation (Oosterlynck et al, 2013a). In other words, we wonder whether considering social innovation a local phenomenon entails the risk of falling into ‘the local trap’: for example the a priori assumption that the local scale is preferable to larger scales (Purcell and Brown, 2005). Escaping the local trap entails challenging the assumption that social innovation is a solely bottom-up practice, embracing a more comprehensive and relational approach on how it actually moves between and across scales, depending on the strategies it adopts and on the institutional scalar arrangements framing its development. This does not mean that the local does not play a relevant and special role. Many initiatives are indeed ‘bottom linked’ and the ‘local’ is the level where all other levels conflate. The same cannot be said about the supra-local dimensions, which might play an irrelevant role in socially innovative initiatives.

Our endeavour at addressing social innovation through the lens of multi-scalarity is organised as follows. The next section introduces the concept of scale in relation to social innovation, and provides a description of the rescaling processes involving social policies in Europe and their implications for social innovation. Section three presents the empirical findings emerging from the analysis of the case studies of the ImPRovE project. Here we identify which scales are mainly involved in social innovation and how opportunities and hindrances are distributed among those scales.