| Abstrakt: |
Established in 2012 in response to socio-economic challenges in South Auckland, The Southern Initiative (TSI) promises “transformational social, economic and physical change” through social innovation and entrepreneurship (Auckland Council, 2018b). Social innovation initiatives such as TSI have become a structural feature of post-industrial urban governance and the subject of significant academic scholarship since the 2010s. This research has been largely limited to conceptual considerations and analysis of local instantiations of social innovation. This article seeks to use the case of TSI to explore the macro relationship between social innovation initiatives and urban capitalism. In particular, I focus on the means through which TSI articulates the causes of social issues in South Auckland and the solutions to these promises. Utilising Glynos and Howarth’s Lacanian-inspired logics approach, I argue that TSI illustrates a central contradiction driving social innovation policy discourse; while these discourses promise transformational change in response to socio-economic challenges, they foreclose upon the structural causes of these challenges and, as a result, are limited to minor interventions that are incompatible with the original mission. In response, a fantasmatic logic has emerged in which the promise of TSI can be reproduced by restaging these challenges as the more manageable failures of individuals, whānau and communities. As such, TSI policy discourse is especially ‘sticky’ because it offers the possibility of community change without having to engage in radical modes of institutional or macroeconomic transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
