Millard Jeremy, Fucci Vincenzo
Third Millennium Governance, Ry, Denmark.
International Center, Danish Technological Institute, Taastrup, Denmark.
Front Sociol. 2023 Mar 21;8:966918. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2023.966918. eCollection 2023.
Tackling the rapid rise in global poverty is one of the most pressing challenges the world faces today, especially in this new age of turbulence. On top of the ongoing environmental crisis, the last fifteen years has been rocked by the financial crisis of 2007-8, compounded by the 2020 Covid-pandemic and then by the 2022 war in Ukraine, each of which has negatively impacted all aspects of sustainable development. Although in practice many development organizations have been using the methods and processes of social innovation to tackle poverty and vulnerability for many years, it is only recently that they have specifically begun to analyse and codify its contribution to these and other SDGs. Social innovation provides beneficial social outcomes for citizens and other actors, often at local level with the strong bottom-up involvement of civil society and through its cross-actor, cross-sector, cross-disciplinary and cross-cutting strengths. Importantly, it aims to empower those with a social need, particularly when they have little to begin with. It focuses on increasing the beneficiaries' own agency and capability rather than passively only relying on others to act on their behalf. This is done by transforming social relationships and developing new collaborative processes. Amongst a wide range of recent and contemporary sources, this paper analyses a large scale quantitative and qualitative global survey of social innovations that tackle poverty and vulnerability in different global regions. It examines various definitions of poverty, including extreme, absolute and relative measures as well as arguably more useful approaches like the Multidimensional Poverty Index. It proposes how social innovation should be recalibrated to meet the increasing threats of the new age of turbulence, including by deploying the sociological lens of the agency-structure dichotomy to show why the public sector needs to become involved more proactively in social innovation. It also looks at certain myths around poverty and vulnerability, examines why we need to revise our understanding of sustainable development and resilience, and why a new nexus approach is needed that combines SDG1 with other strongly related SDGs.
应对全球贫困的迅速加剧是当今世界面临的最紧迫挑战之一，尤其是在这个新的动荡时代。除了持续的环境危机，过去十五年还受到2007 - 2008年金融危机的冲击，2020年新冠疫情以及2022年乌克兰战争更是雪上加霜，每一次危机都对可持续发展的各个方面产生了负面影响。尽管实际上许多发展组织多年来一直在运用社会创新的方法和流程来应对贫困和脆弱性问题，但直到最近他们才开始专门分析并编纂其对这些及其他可持续发展目标的贡献。社会创新为公民和其他行为主体带来有益的社会成果，通常是在地方层面，在民间社会自下而上的有力参与下，并凭借其跨行为主体、跨部门、跨学科和跨领域的优势。重要的是，它旨在增强有社会需求者的权能，尤其是那些起点很低的人。它注重增强受益者自身的能动性和能力，而不是仅仅被动地依赖他人为其行事。这是通过转变社会关系和开发新的协作流程来实现的。在众多近期和当代的资料来源中，本文分析了一项针对不同全球区域应对贫困和脆弱性的社会创新的大规模定量和定性全球调查。它审视了贫困的各种定义，包括极端贫困、绝对贫困和相对贫困衡量标准，以及诸如多维贫困指数等可能更有用的方法。它提出应如何重新调整社会创新以应对新时代动荡带来的日益增加的威胁，包括通过运用能动性 - 结构二分法的社会学视角来表明为何公共部门需要更积极地参与社会创新。它还探讨了围绕贫困和脆弱性的某些误区，审视了我们为何需要修正对可持续发展和复原力的理解，以及为何需要一种将可持续发展目标1与其他紧密相关的可持续发展目标相结合的新的关联方法。
