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The debate on social innovation has rapidly expanded over the last decade. There are considerable expectations of the potential of social innovation for addressing urgent societal challenges in rural communities living in mountain regions. Forests provide a long list of benefits to people and are vital to communities. Sustainable use of forest ecosystem services can provide a substantial contribution to the wellbeing of those communities. In spite of the importance of forest in climate change mitigation highlighted since Rio Earth Summit in 1992, potential of rural communities living in mountain regions has been overlooked in a long term. We follow approach developed in the Horizon2020 project SIMRA (Social Innovation in Marginalised Rural Areas) and explore social innovation in rural communities as “reconfiguration of social practices, in response to societal challenges, which seeks to enhance outcomes on societal well-being and necessarily includes the engagement of civil society actors”. Informed by innovation theory the principal concern of the paper is to determine the types of SIs, which are likely to occur in marginalized rural areas (MRAs), and what can be done to enhance the innovation potential across different types of MRAs. Emergence of social innovations is seen as the collective action, which is comforted or distracted by its surroundings and societal challenges that are affecting dynamics of changes. A key questions to be addressed are: Why communities in some MRAs respond to societal problems? How to integrate experience and local knowledge on forest ecosystem services, selforganization and shared responsibility into the forest governance to enhance wellbeing? In particular the aim is to i) identify the patterns that enable and constrain (lock-ins, path-dependencies) efforts for social innovations in rural communities living in mountain regions to emerge, nurture and develop, ii) present framework for understanding relationships, variables and trajectories of SI in marginalized regions and apply them for rural communities. |
