Social Innovation, Welfare Regimes and National/Urban Agendas: Going Outside “the Local Trap” in Social Innovation Studies

The debate on social innovation focuses on the local and is widely based on case studies, producing a proliferation of interpretations that make it difficult to conceptualise the phenomenon itself. In this chapter, we analyse social innovation policies in a comparative perspective and we explore the existence of a relationship between the ways of implementing social innovation policies and the welfare regimes of nine European countries. What emerges is a strong relationship between the welfare regime and national and local social innovation agendas that depends on the solidity of national and local welfare infrastructures. This characteristic is, therefore, at risk of turning innovation into a reinforcing factor of pre-existing historical trends, and the gap between welfare systems would be destined to increase rather than decrease as a consequence of the spread of social innovation as a key policy strategy