Grassroots Innovation Movements

Adrian Smith, Mariano Fressoli, Dinesh Abrol, Elisa Arond, Adrian Ely

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317451181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Sviluppo sostenibile

Innovation is increasingly invoked by policy elites and business leaders as vital for tackling global challenges like sustainable development. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that networks of community groups, activists, and researchers have been innovating grassroots solutions for social justice and environmental sustainability for decades. Unencumbered by disciplinary boundaries, policy silos, or institutional logics, these 'grassroots innovation movements' identify issues and questions neglected by formal science, technology and innovation organizations. Grassroots solutions arise in unconventional settings through unusual combinations of people, ideas and tools.

This book examines six diverse grassroots innovation movements in India, South America and Europe, situating them in their particular dynamic historical contexts. Analysis explains why each movement frames innovation and development differently, resulting in a variety of strategies. The book explores the spaces where each of these movements have grown, or attempted to do so. It critically examines the pathways they have developed for grassroots innovation and the challenges and limitations confronting their approaches.

With mounting pressure for social justice in an increasingly unequal world, policy makers are exploring how to foster more inclusive innovation. In this context grassroots experiences take on added significance. This book provides timely and relevant ideas, analysis and recommendations for activists, policy-makers, students and scholars interested in encounters between innovation, development and social movements.

1 INTRODUCING GRASSROOTS INNOVATION MOVEMENTS

DOI: 10.4324/9781315697888-1

In August 2015, while we were writing this book, a group of sustainability activists were gathering in the grounds of a borrowed château on the outskirts of Paris. They were intent upon ‘eco-hacking’ the future. What this meant was turning the château into a temporary innovation camp, equipped with the tools for developing a variety of technologies of practical and symbolic value for low-carbon living. These prototypes made use of open source designs and instructions in order that others can access, adapt and make use of these developments. The activity of the camp was publicized widely through social media and drew the attention of many commentators and even senior politicians (see www.poc21.cc for examples).

The camp was called POC21. Its location and timing were significant. Paris was gearing up to host in December 2015: the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21), and the latest meeting of governments and global elites figuring out how to address climate change. Meanwhile, POC21 stands for, and seeks, a ‘proof of concept’ for an alternative approach. POC21 brought together on site over a hundred makers, designers, engineers, scientists and geeks, drawn from various international activist networks, and many more who joined in virtually over social media, or visited, and committed to prototyping for a fossil-free, zero-waste society. The designs and hacks they developed collaboratively ranged from low-cost wind turbines, to facilities for urban farming, to a 3D-printed bottle-top water filtration device; from easy-build cargo bikes, to open source energy monitors, to permaculture; and from low-consumption recirculating showers, to portable solar power packs. Their alternative approach is based on the premise that people at the grassroots level already have the ideas, knowledge, tools and capabilities required to create their own innovative solutions to climate change and sustainable development. Drawing upon practical initiatives connected to a variety of open source, collaborative peer production networks globally, the aim at POC21 is to mobilize a mainstreaming of these ready-made solutions. Immediately after their five-week camp, the organizers of POC21 set out the follow-up challenge as ‘how can we turn this momentum into a sustainable movement’ (email correspondence, 30 September 2015).

This book argues that a movement already exists. POC21 taps into increasing interest among growing groups and networks of people for directly hacking, making and modifying the world they find around them, and refashioning it towards more inclusive, fairer and sustainable goals. Furthermore, POC21 connects unconsciously to a longer tradition of subverting high-level summitry in order to raise awareness of grassroots solutions. These subversions go right back to the first United Nations (UN) Summit on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972. At the Stockholm summit, a group called Powwow convened activists who emphasized their argument, for radically different development alternatives to the political and economic interests of the industrialists and policymakers orchestrating the main summit, with the organization of a demonstration of alternative technologies emblematic of the futures Powwow wanted (Boyle and Harper, 1976; Faramelli, 1972). Although largely forgotten now, the legacy of Powwow, as with POC21, can be seen as one of a multitude of demonstrations of grassroots innovation arising around the world over decades, and whose associated social movements have bequeathed practices as varied as wind energy and participatory design, agroecology and eco-housing, as well as an insistent idea that alternative forms of innovation and sustainable developments are necessary and possible. POC21 was another moment galvanizing grassroots innovation for sustainable developments.

Opening this book with examples such as POC21 and Powwow might give the impression that grassroots innovation for sustainable developments is predominantly a Northern environmentalist concern. Far from it! In the same year that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) highlighted alarming industrial contamination and environmental decline, and became catalytic for Northern environmentalism, activists in Kerala launched Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad (KSSP, lit. Kerala Science Literature Forum), a programme for making science and technology work for the needs and priorities of local communities. Initially, KSSP involved a group of science writers and teachers who published textbooks in their local language, aiming to make science and technology more widely available and socially relevant to grassroots communities, rather than to the plans of elite industrial modernizers. Similar groups formed across India and joined together into the People’s Science Movement. Their vision was to re-imagine and reorientate science and technology towards the lived experiences and knowledges of local communities. Over the years, the movement has dedicated itself to grassroots activism and improvements in people’s lives that work towards different kinds of sustainable developments compared both to the high modernist ambitions of the Indian state and to Gandhian village self-sufficiency.

High-level summitry provides arenas for grassroots innovators from the global South too (Letty et al., 2012). Examples in agroecology, housing, energy and recycling, developed through initiatives such as the Social Technology Network in Brazil, were displayed at the People’s Summit in Flamengo Park at the Rio+20 Summit. Activists in these networks consciously draw upon lessons from experiences from appropriate technology in South America two decades earlier; and they connect with wider social movements today to press for a different kind of development. A thorough critique of industrialization models offered by elites was an important part of the Powwow agenda in Stockholm. Like POC21, the Social Technology Network and many others since, Powwow recognized that solutions had to work in diverse circumstances. But what all these grassroots innovation movements share is a commitment to helping people access tools for building alternatives.

The aim in this book is to make grassroots innovation movements more visible, and to learn from their experiences, in order that people can better understand, appreciate and engage with them in the pursuit of sustainable developments. We do this by analysing six case studies from different places and different times:

• the movement for socially useful production (UK, 1976–1986)
• the appropriate technology movement (South America, 1970s and 1980s)
• the People’s Science Movement (India, 1960s to present)
• hackerspaces, fablabs and makerspaces (international, 2000s to present)
• the Social Technology Network (Brazil, 2000s to present)
• the Honey Bee Network (India, 1990s to present).

Across these cases, we attempt to identify within their diverse situations some common causes and deep-seated challenges that other grassroots innovation movements might recognize and connect with. Such possibilities will inevitably play out differently in different contexts, but perhaps with greater facility thanks to learning with others from elsewhere. We will explain the choice of these cases and our approach later in this chapter. For now, we wish to elaborate a little more upon what we mean by grassroots innovation movements and upon some of the challenges of studying their pathways to sustainable developments.

Radical roots and alternative routes

Throughout the history of social movements for both environmentalism and development, there has existed an associated undercurrent of practical grassroots innovation committed to values of social justice and environmentally sustainable developments (Hess, 2007; Rist, 2011; Schumacher, 1973; Smith, 2005; Thackara, 2015). In North and South, in cities and rural settings, networks of activists, development workers, community groups and neighbours have been working with people to generate bottom-up solutions for sustainable developments; solutions that respond to the local situation and the interests and values of the communities involved; and where those communities have control over the processes involved and the outcomes. Initiatives have flourished, and struggled, in sectors as diverse as water and sanitation, housing and habitats, food and agriculture, energy, mobility, manufacturing, health, education, communications and many other spheres of activity. Whether born of material and economic necessity, or motivated by social issues marginalized by the conventional innovation systems of states and markets, networks of people promote and coordinate alternative activity attentive to these needs and issues. They develop discourse and mobilize supportive resources among wider publics. It is this activity that constitutes what we mean by grassroots innovation movements and gives us our working definition (see also Gupta et al., 2003; Seyfang and Smith, 2007).

Grassroots innovation proceeds through groups and activities different from mainstream innovation processes in institutions such as universities, public research and development (R&D) labs and innovation departments at companies; and which have traditionally networked around formally organized research institutions. Innovation policy aims are generally expressed as an imperative to catch up with or keep up with an apparently universal techno-economic frontier, typically based in information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology (Freeman, 1992; Perez, 1983). Furthermore, mainstream institutions for science, technology and innovation are generally aimed at nurturing partnerships between firms and science and technology institutes, fostering entrepreneurship and incentivizing returns on investment in innovation activities whose outputs boost competitiveness and economic growth.

In contrast, our interest in grassroots innovation movements involves studying how grassroots groups understand and mobilize around questions of local development. What are alluring about grassroots innovation movements are claims that they involve a base of local actors and therefore different forms of knowledge, including community-based and indigenous knowledge and the knowledge of the lay public in the process of innovation. Unconcerned and unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries or institutional constraints, movements can identify issues and questions that are not usually regarded by science, technology and innovation institutions, and they can search for solutions differently too. However, none of this is automatic or assured. Grassroots innovation is hard work; participation requires patience and stamina, and practical dilemmas challenge cherished values, as do structural disadvantages presented by prevailing political economies and institutions. The extent to which the grassroots innovation movements enable creativity, inclusion and the agency of local actors in the complexities of innovation is something that will be explored in this book.

Importantly, among the openings that grassroots innovation movements help cultivate are plural ideas about what constitutes sustainable developments. The global consultation process of the World Commission on Environment and Development in the mid-1980s brought together some of the issues at stake in sustainable developments, and eventually reported with this widely cited definition in 1987:

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:

• the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given;
• the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.

(World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987, p. 43)

There is much to debate in this definition. What are essential needs? What is meant by environmental limitations? What is a state of technology? What kinds of developments, and for whom, and why? Who gets to decide these things? Any application of these principles has to grapple with questions of development purposes, directions of innovation and issues of social justice. Looked at dynamically and constructively, calls for sustainable developments simply raise defining questions, without being definitive on the answers. Sustainable development is thus valuable as an essentially contested concept overflowing with normative content (Jacobs, 1999). It is a matter for principled debate and democratic action to figure out how to construct development pathways that express values of environmental integrity and social justice. The pathways to sustainable developments need to be plural (Leach et al., 2010).

To take one illustrative contrast, large solar electricity farms operated by multinational utility companies create quite a different sustainability compared to smaller community cooperatives installing panels in their neighbourhoods (Smith et al., 2015). Questions of distributive and procedural social justice look quite different under each arrangement: who benefits from a hitherto marginally interesting resource such as daylight, made newly valuable by shifting social priorities and technological advances? Why are the benefits of this widely shared resource distributed in particular ways, and why should historically determined access to capital and markets privilege access to this local resource? Pluralist sustainable developments also involve questions of cognitive justice in terms of what kinds of knowledge and experience count in deliberating upon the relative prominence of different criteria for shaping and choosing between solutions. Knowledge about local histories and culture can affect the relative legitimacy and consequences of different developments, compared to, say, the more abstracted cost–benefit knowledge that may count as more legitimate for distant investors and with different interests.

In studying grassroots innovation movements, we are interested in how groups and networks address questions of development, how they seek to express their values in their innovation activities and what shapes the pathways they build through that activity. We do not wish to impose our own definitions of sustainable development, and nor do we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Endorsements
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• 1 Introducing grassroots innovation movements
• 2 An analytical framework for studying grassroots innovation movements
• 3 Socially useful production
• 4 The appropriate technology movement in South America
• 5 People’s Science Movements
• 6 Hackerspaces, fablabs and makerspaces
• 7 The Social Technology Network
• 8 The Honey Bee Network
• 9 Grassroots innovation movements: lessons for theory and practice
• 10 Conclusions
• References
• Index