Abstract
Community-led social innovations have great potential to drive sustainable change but often struggle to sustain themselves in urban governance systems. Social learning is a prevalent strategy for sustaining social innovation, but limits understanding of, and abilities for transforming its relational dynamics. Drawing on classical pragmatism, I explain how experiential learning offers a relational framework for facilitating an interactive, holistic and embodied process of learning to transform engrained relational patterns and hegemonic forces that constrain personal and social potentialities. Based on action research conducted with an impactful community-led social innovation struggling to sustain itself, I conceptualize experiential learning as learning-in-relation-to-others-and-the-world: cultivating capacities and resources for growing individually and together in relation to hegemonic forces. I conclude that learning should not be treated as an internal responsibility of social innovations but as a key condition for ecosystems that sustain social innovation and transform urban governance.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1-20 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | Innovation: the European Journal of Social Science Research |
Volume | 2022 |
Early online date | 23 Sept 2022 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 23 Sept 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Keywords
- social innovation
- experiential learning
- social learning
- classical pragmatism
- relationality
- action research
- urban governance
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Public Administration
- Urban Studies
- Social Sciences (miscellaneous)