In order to describe the climate-relevant impact and effectiveness of social innovations, tailor-made methodological concepts as well as knowledge about the respective local context are needed to understand their effectiveness and to be able to identify the levers in relation to climate impacts. In the field of social innovation research, however, there is still a lack of explicit impact hypotheses, established standards on methodological evaluation approaches and impact indicators to directly and indirectly capture impacts and changes. However, these are needed in order to evaluate the impact of different social innovations in terms of their contribution to climate change adaptation and energy system transformation in the form of personal and societal changes and the resulting climate impact in a comparative manner with regard to their effectiveness.
The SI4Climate_Impact project will make a significant contribution by systematically reviewing existing knowledge on the forms and dynamics of social innovations in sustainability contexts. Leading to an improved understanding of the characteristics of social innovation and its capacity to change society in various thematic areas as well as in a multi-level perspective. Based on this, this R&D service will formulate explicit impact hypotheses as well as associated impact indicators in the areas with the greatest leverage effect and propose an evaluation framework, which, after an exemplary evaluation on selected projects, will result in the formulation of recommendations for funding offers and project proposals. In this way, the foundations of social innovation research can be further developed and the impact assessment of social innovations can be improved with regard to attitudes, values and behavioural patterns or readiness to change behaviour, to adopt innovations or to participate in their development themselves. To do so, three centers at AIT (Center for Innovation Systems and Policy, Center for Technology Experience and Center for Energy) are joining forces and working together with experts and practitioners on the climate-related impact of social innovation in different sustainability contexts.
Start: 03/2023
End: 05/2024
Funded by: Austrian Climate and Energy fund
Contact: Gudrun Haindlmaier
Website: https://smartcities.at/projects/si4climate_impact/
