Letting it Grow: Experiential Learning in Social Innovations Below the Radar

Social innovations have become key to developing grass-roots alternatives for enhancing the sustainability and resilience of local communities. But even though many initiatives successfully meet local needs through innovative ideas and practices, their sustainability and transformative impact are fundamentally limited as they tend to operate ‘below the radar’ of recognition and support. This raises a double-edged question: how can social innovations grow and sustain themselves and how can policy-makers and researchers support this? Classical pragmatists like Dewey and Follett envisioned the development of a new, self-organizing socio-political system through processes of experiential learning. Deliberative policy analysis provides a moral-analytical program for facilitating such transformative learning and change in the face of hegemonic political-economic systems. The purpose of this paper is to critically appraise what is involved in experiential learning processes and what its achievements and challenges imply for social innovations, policy-makers and deliberative policy analysts. I will offer both substantive and methodological reflections on action research I conducted with Tree House Liverpool. This community organization makes a huge difference to the well-being of the local community but is unable to obtain structural support and funding from institutional actors. I will discuss how our experiences with co-producing a ‘knowledge exchange’ visit, a short animated movie, and a collaborative event were a matter of letting it grow: creating conditions for experiential learning which gradually bolstered capacities and resources for sustaining the organization in an unsustainable governance environment.