The double bind of social innovation: Relational dynamics of change and resistance in neighbourhood governance

Abstract

Chinese

While current discourse promotes social innovation as a normative good, in practice it is highly contested by institutionalised ways of thinking, acting and organising. Concurrently stimulating and resisting innovation creates a ‘double bind’ of conflicting communicative signals that weaken capacities for joint sense making and sustainable change. I develop a meta-theoretical framework that explains what is involved in these relational dynamics of change and resistance, how these can be assessed and improved, and why the double bind both necessitates and inhibits substantive change. Analysing relational dynamics in a case of neighbourhood governance in Amsterdam, I argue that social innovators should be prepared to constructively confront rationalistic evaluation, defensiveness, and experiential detachment while institutional actors should welcome fundamental relational transformations of hierarchical and competitive dynamics institutionalised in urban governance.

Keywords

communication neighbourhood governance practice relationality social innovation

Introduction

Amidst massive budget cuts and austerity policies, we are witnessing a fundamental transition in discourse on the affordability of, and responsibility for public wellbeing. Most notably, the British coalition government advocated a Big Society in which citizens ‘don’t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities’ (Cameron, 2010). Social innovation is depicted as a ‘normative good’ (Osborne and Brown, 2011) for meeting societal needs and transforming Western governance systems. Over the past years, an abundance of initiatives already emerged, mainly in urban settings, generating new services and practices which are more effective, inclusive and empowering than institutionalised ways of working (Drewe et al., 2008; Evers et al., 2014; Moulaert et al., 2013; Nicholls et al., 2015).

However, this mainstreaming of the social dimension of innovation is usually not accompanied by recognition of the ways in which it is constantly contested, challenged and resisted in practice. For a variety of reasons, institutionalised ways of thinking, acting and organising not only prove difficult to change but actively impede social innovation (Cels et al., 2012; Evers et al., 2014; Moulaert et al., 2007). Building on earlier analyses of this double-sided nature of social innovation (e.g. Swyngedouw, 2005), I propose that social innovation faces a double bind (Bateson et al., 1956) of being concurrently encouraged and discouraged to do things differently. As these conflicting communicative signals weaken capacities for joint sense making and sustainable change, the question arises how the resultant relational dynamics of change and resistance are and should be navigated.

Following calls for a meta-theoretical framework to analyse relational dynamics (Jessop et al., 2013), I identify three dimensions of relationships in social, democratic and public-sector innovation (negotiating multiple meanings, confronting hegemonic institutions and embedding in multi-scalar systems) and elaborate three evaluative criteria for assessing and improving these (dynamic becoming, relationality and holism). Based on relational process ontology (Follett, 1919, 1924, 1934; Stout and Love, 2015), I argue that relational dynamics become more productive when stakeholders seek to integrate differences through inclusive, emergent and appreciative processes of co-creating rather than imposing dominant views or sustaining fixed positions through (counter-)hegemonic practices of hierarchy and competition. I then analyse the relational dynamics of neighbourhood governance in Amsterdam (the Netherlands) based on action research conducted with Neighbourhood Practice Teams (Buurt Praktijk Teams – BPTs). BPTs successfully enabled residents to transform their neighbourhoods by ‘doing what’s necessary’, but, despite much appraisal, support and conducive policy discourse, continue to face fundamental resistances to their innovation. Analysing narratives of rationalistic evaluation, defensiveness and experiential detachment, I reveal how the double bind of social innovation can be productively confronted through integrative dynamics but also necessitates fundamental relational transformations of hierarchical and competitive dynamics institutionalised in urban governance.

The double bind of social innovation

Over the past two decades, social innovation has gradually become appropriated and mainstreamed in policy discourse as a key tool for governance reform (Jessop et al., 2013: 116–121). As policies started to recognise the social dimension of innovation, it was especially adopted in urban governance to foster integrated area development and combat social exclusion in local spaces and public welfare (Moulaert et al., 2005). It aims, alongside public-sector innovation (Osborne and Brown, 2011), to satisfy unmet social needs and generate better service provision (product dimension) while, similar to democratic innovation (Smith, 2009), also striving to enhance capacities and resources for participation and inclusion in decision-making (empowerment dimension). A distinctive trait of social innovation is to achieve these aims by transforming social relationships (process dimension); connecting ‘societal wellbeing and progress with the shape and organization of society – relations of power, solidarity and affect between individuals and social groups’ (Moulaert et al., 2013: 2). However, such substantive transformations are often absent as neoliberal discourse promotes more reductive forms of social innovation instrumental to its welfare state reform agenda (Massey and Johnston-Miller, 2016; Moulaert et al., 2007; Swyngedouw, 2005).

Since the financial and economic crisis, a fundamental shift occurred in discourse on the affordability of, and responsibility for public welfare. Traditional welfare state arrangements are retrenched in favour of greater individual responsibility, private and voluntary service provision and community self-organisation (Hurenkamp et al., 2012; Verhoeven and Tonkens, 2013). As governments carry out austerity policies because of expensive bank bailouts, soaring sovereign debts, unprecedented economic recession and rocketing unemployment, policies promote a ‘neoliberal roll-back governmentality’ (Peck and Tickell, 2002) that nudges social entrepreneurs, exemplary practitioners and communities toward social innovation. As Cels et al. (2012: 220) put it, there is now ‘an unprecedented need to see how service levels can be maintained with less money … [and] how to be more effective, efficient, and equitable’. Social innovation has become ‘crucial to the core business of governments[,] … a last hope to deal with widening fiscal gaps’. Hence, social innovation is depicted as a normative good (Osborne and Brown, 2011) throughout the Western world (Evers et al., 2014; Massey and Johnston-Miller, 2016; Moulaert et al., 2013; Murray et al., 2010; Nicholls et al., 2015).

One could interpret this discursive shift as welcome recognition for the potential of social innovation and much needed widening of conditions conducive to substantive change. Indeed, there is a rich collection of new services and grass-roots initiatives, the majority of which emerge in cities as problems with social exclusion and deprivation as well as potentials for greater connectivity and empowerment are most tangible and pressing in urban fabrics (Cels et al., 2012; Drewe et al., 2008; Evers et al., 2014; Moulaert et al., 2005, 2007, 2013; Nicholls et al., 2015). For example, Evers et al. (2014) showcase 77 innovations from 20 European cities, including citizen initiatives providing assistance to immigrants and public agency and voluntary-sector-driven projects of social housing teams for vulnerable groups. These innovations fundamentally challenge conventional responsibilities for local wellbeing engrained in social relationships and urban governance institutions.

However, systemic transformations of social relationships and urban governance institutions are hardly achieved (Cels et al., 2012; Evers et al., 2014; Mendes et al., 2012; Moulaert et al., 2005, 2007, 2013). All too often, (local) governments do not provide conditions conducive for innovations to emerge, thrive and have a sustainable impact. Existing power relations, institutional configurations and historical trajectories not only prove difficult to change but also actively inhibit innovation. As innovations are always disruptive of what is there, their nature, value and outcomes are inevitably contested. A common finding is that social innovators, besides concentrating on the people, issues and solutions they care about, also need to devote a lot of time and energy to transforming urban governance systems. Therefore, ‘one of the enduring questions … concerns the relationship between the socially innovative actions “on the ground” and the broader institutional and policy environment in which such actions happen’ (MacCallum, 2013: 343).

Several studies already highlighted the double-sided nature of social innovation. Swyngedouw (2005) explored the contradictory tendencies involved in the technologies and tactics of governance-beyond-the-state. While on the one hand it creates opportunities for democratic, inclusive and transformative grass-roots initiatives to emerge and influence governance systems, on the other hand technocratic and authoritarian governing practices often instrumentalise, depoliticise and disempower innovations (De Wilde, 2015; Novy and Hammer, 2007; Pradel et al., 2013). Wagenaar and Specht (2010: 20–21) call this a ‘double participation paradox’: officials invite citizens to participate in governance but then create all kinds of barriers and resistances which both greatly frustrate new initiatives and inhibit the reforms they set out to achieve. Hence, social innovators are encouraged to develop new ways of thinking, acting and organising but are constantly contested, challenged and resisted while doing so.

This article suggests that these conflicting pressures to both transform and conform to existing institutions generate a double bind. Commonly known as a situation in which contradictory demands make it impossible to avoid unfavourable results, ‘double bind’ is a term developed in psychotherapy to explain how schizophrenia can result from systemic exposure to situations and relationships which produce conflicting communicative signals (Bateson et al., 1956, 1963). A double bind not only triggers defensive responses in the absence of an unambiguous notion of the right thing to do, but more fundamentally debilitates meta-communicative capacities to interpret what others mean, express intentions and break through habitual patterns. Thus, social innovations are in more than a challenging or paradoxical situation: they are damned if they give in to institutional pressures (which means legitimising and sustaining the formal institutional order at the expense of their innovation) and damned if they do not (which means challenging existing institutions and underlying worldviews at the expense of institutional actors’ willingness to accept their innovation). Their communicative practices are inevitably fraught with ambiguity, defensiveness and misunderstanding, putting great strain on their ability to transform social relationships and governance institutions.

As this double bind seems insurmountable, we need to look into how it is practically enacted and can be meaningfully navigated (González and Healey, 2005; see also Wagenaar, 2014b). Rather than sanguine descriptions of transformative successes or critical analyses of contingent complexities, this requires a meta-theoretical framework that focuses on the relationships through which social innovations are enacted (Jessop et al., 2013) and clarifies evaluative criteria for assessing and improving their dynamics of change and resistance. While some argue that a scarcity in research inhibits such systematic definition and assessment (Massey and Johnston-Miller, 2016), the next section constructs a meta-theoretical framework by building on the burgeoning literatures of social, democratic and public-sector innovation.

Relational dynamics of change and resistance

Jessop et al. (2013) propose to understand social innovation through an ontology of social transformation, ‘an ontological perspective premised on the social, spatio-temporal, and substantive contingency of social relations and on the correlative human capacities for social transformation’ (112). This meta-theoretical approach is supported by calls to conceptualise and examine the relational dynamics through which social innovation takes shape (Forester, 2014; González and Healey, 2005; Hillier, 2013). In line with practice theory (Cook and Wagenaar, 2012; Nicolini, 2012; Wenger, 1998), the idea is to move toward more interactive and dynamic analyses of micro-practices enacted in-between stakeholders implicated in complex situations and embedded in dense webs of contingent interconnections. It is important to note this involves both an empirical focus on relationships (as enacted in specific practices) and a normative evaluation of relational dynamics (the quality of interpersonal processes). That is, the same activities can be conducted in fundamentally different ways depending on the underlying characteristics of their interpersonal dynamics (Stout, 2012).

Relational process ontology (Follett, 1919, 1924, 1934; Stout, 2012; Stout and Love, 2015; Stout and Staton, 2011) helps to clarify evaluative criteria for relational dynamics based on its ontological principles of dynamic becoming, holism, relationality and co-creation. In brief, relational process ontology sees the world in terms of the innate social bonds between people and the dynamic interplay of all interrelated elements in their environment. By assuming that ‘reality is in the relating, in the activity-between’ (Follett, 1924: 54), we can evaluate social innovation in terms of the specific interpersonal practices that foster or inhibit the quality of its ongoing reciprocal interaction. Adopting these philosophical assumptions can guide us toward more productive relationships and transformative change – much in contrast to the instrumental relationships and marginal change fostered by the static, atomistic and dualistic principles of the neoliberal paradigm (Jessop et al., 2013).

To explain the resultant meta-theoretical framework, I will discuss three practices of social innovation – negotiating multiple meanings, confronting hegemonic institutions and embedding in multi-scalar systems – that constitute the dimensions of an empirical focus on its relationships. I will elaborate each of these with relational process ontology principles to clarify the evaluative criteria for assessing and improving relational dynamics of change and resistance.

First, social innovation is characterised by a multiplicity of forms, conflicting meanings and discursive and institutional contexts populated by multiple stakeholders. The literatures on public sector and democratic innovation problematise wrongful images, naïve assumptions and teleological expectations by revealing many contingent factors, complex dynamics and unanticipated consequences (Bekkers et al., 2011; Borins, 2001; Hoppe, 2011; Osborne and Brown, 2005, 2011, 2013; Smith, 2009; Wagenaar, 2014a). Notwithstanding great potential and successful cases, there are usually strong discrepancies between transformative ambitions and hoped-for effects on the one hand and actual capacities, commitment and change on the other. Innovations can take many forms, follow different pathways and are strongly context-dependent. Moreover, it is difficult to get to grips with innovation, both conceptually (Osborne and Brown, 2005, e.g. identify 23 definitions) and practically (Bartels, 2015, e.g. lists 36 relevant factors). Hence, what social innovation is and how it works out is articulated, negotiated and contested in-between those involved.

The ontological principle of dynamic becoming clarifies that social innovation is not a static and objective thing but a continually evolving process of activities, interpretations and tensions. Social innovation is never one thing to everyone and will not lead to a single, final product. While we may be able to discern certain changes and outcomes (innovation), these are only moments in an ongoing developmental process (innovating). It ‘is always unfolding in a process of becoming’ (Stout and Love, 2015: 26) that involves both potentialities and resistances. This view leads us away from a teleological mapping of factors that either foster or inhibit innovation toward tracing how all activities, interpretations and tensions bring each other dynamically into being through ‘circular response’:

response is always to a relation, the relation between the response and that to which the response is being made … My response is not to a crystallized product of the past, static for the moment of meeting; while I am behaving, the environment is changing because of my behaving, and my behavior is a response to the new situation which I, in part, have created. (Follett, 1924: 63–64)

In other words, dynamic becoming means that social innovations are constantly shape-shifting and evolving. Therefore, its relational dynamics should foster recognition of differences and facilitate new emergent understandings rather than impose static views or sustain fixed positions (Follett, 2003).

Second, social innovation is enacted in the face of hegemonic institutions and power relationships. A key lesson of the social and democratic innovation literatures is that structural power inequalities foster cosmetic reforms and inhibit learning and innovation (Blakeley, 2010; Cels et al., 2012; Davies, 2009; Forester, 1999; Fuller and Geddes, 2008; Headlam and Rowe, 2014; Moulaert et al., 2007; Novy and Hammer, 2007; Rowe and Ashworth, 2010; Stout, 2010). The control-oriented, fragmented and power-preserving institutional organisation of governance systems is often ill-suited, or sometimes even outright hostile to the informal, emergent and subversive practices through which innovations emerge and thrive. Public agencies and officials tend to engage in rigid, conservative or defensive behaviour as they perceive it as a threat to current funding, jobs and status; disqualification of their good intentions, hard work and accomplishments; or something futile and temporary with unclear procedures, outcomes and accountability. Moreover, policy discourse can co-opt innovations into a new moral order of self-government, individual responsibility and apolitical engagement. So, social innovations have to accommodate (González and Healey, 2005) or overcome (Novy and Hammer, 2007) institutional constraints and hegemonic contestations that subtly prioritise institutionalised interests, routines and power relationships.

The ontological principle of relationality implies that we do not treat social innovation as a superior alternative to hegemonic institutions (Staniševski, 2011; Stout and Love, 2015; Stout and Staton, 2011). Favouring counter-hegemony equally means dominating rather than transforming interpersonal dynamics. Instead, we should focus on confrontations between social innovation and hegemonic institutions by assessing how both coexist and clash in practice and in which ways diverse stakeholders navigate their competing values, logics and demands in the pursuit of, or in resistance to actual changes and potential futures (Pradel et al., 2013). While they may constitute mutually exclusive modes of thinking, acting and organising (see Blaug, 2002), they are also mutually implicated. Creative, informal and subversive practices and a well-functioning system of public decision-making and service provision both form necessary conditions for effective and democratic governance. Sustainable relationships and transformative change will not follow from discrediting either a priori. The principle of relationality prescribes relational dynamics in which confrontations with difference are not met by domination of one over the other but turned into an opportunity for creative integrating (Follett, 2003).

Third, social innovation is a multi-scalar phenomenon as local initiatives are spatio-temporally embedded in multi-level governance systems. Social innovation research into regional, urban and neighbourhood development stresses its context-dependency and, more specifically, how it is bound up with territorial arrangements that structure agreements, cultures and power relationships (González and Healey, 2005; Moulaert et al., 2005, 2007; Pradel et al., 2013). Social innovations often address structural political-economic problems and discourses as these manifest themselves in a particular territory. The territorial context forms an institutional assemblage of opportunities and constraints bound up with multiple arenas and actors, dispersed competencies and intricate urban fabrics. To foster sustainable change, social innovators need a strategy and capacity for transforming this context as well as scaling-up and institutionally embedding their initiatives. Thus, what happens with a social innovation takes shape through multiple connections and interactions across geographical scales.

Ontologically, holism denotes that social innovation is part of a larger, all-inclusive whole. Its ‘situation’ is brought into being by mutually influencing factors and is connected with other situations through multi-scalar networks into the ‘total situation’ (Stout and Love, 2015). Multi-level governance systems and global political-economic structures thus do not form an external context that can be addressed or ignored at will; they relationally constitute the total situation that dynamically shapes and is shaped by an innovation. Social innovation does not stand alone and will not amount to much unless it is seen in terms of the relational interplay of wider forces it is engaged in. Holism thus denotes that relational dynamics should constantly widen the total situation by enabling ever-increasing inclusion of people, factors and reflections. This requires studying ‘whole and parts in their active and continuous relation to each other’ (Follett, 1924: 102; emphasis in original) and discovering what is the best thing to do in the situation at hand – something Follett (2004) calls ‘the law of the situation’.

Altogether, because of their dynamic, relational and holistic nature, social innovations are always evolving through processes of co-creating (Bartels, 2015; Follett, 1919, 1934, 2003; Stout and Love, 2015). Stakeholders are constantly relating to one another and their environment through circular response and reciprocal influence in unfolding situations. Individual and social progress follow from ‘integrating’ differences into a new, qualitatively better whole that is neither finalised nor totalising but creates something that everyone finds better than before. While this inevitably generates new differences necessitating new integratings, fostering integrative dynamics is more productive than sustaining risk-aversive routines, formal rules and rationalistic accountability procedures (hierarchical dynamics) or prioritising organisational survival, status and power (competitive dynamics) over what the situation requires. In other words, the quality of the relational dynamics of social innovation can be assessed and improved by evaluating whether interpersonal processes are characterised by integration (unifying differences and ‘power-with’), hierarchy (domination and ‘power-over’) or competition (fixed positions and compromise).

The next section analyses the relational dynamics of change and resistance in a case that exemplifies the double bind of social innovation. After outlining its context, I present three narratives that each focus on one of the three aforementioned relational dimensions. An evaluation of their relational dynamics clarifies how the double bind both necessitates and inhibits transformative change.

Innovative neighbourhood governance in Amsterdam

Policy discourse in the Netherlands has embraced social innovation as a normative good. After an array of studies, experiments and reports commissioned by the Committee Public Sector Innovation (2006–2013), in the annual royal address of 2013, the Dutch government advocated a transition from ‘the classical welfare state’ to ‘a participation society’ in which ‘everyone who can is asked to take responsibility for his or her own life and environment’ (Troonrede, 2013: 1). Its discourse of ‘affordability’, ‘tailor-made services’, and ‘more independent and assertive’ citizens heeded an ongoing stream of calls for community self-organisation (see Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken, 2013: 9–11) but also legitimised severe budget cuts and a massive decentralisation of responsibilities for youth care, employment and permanent healthcare. Although the welfare state was supposed to be reformed ‘to support civic oomph and suppress bureaucratic resistances’ (Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken, 2013: 3), hierarchy and competition were simultaneously spurred: citizens were paternalistically called upon to volunteer, the mantra of ‘doing more with less’ was imposed on local governments, and local public services were put in a struggle over regulation, resources and responsibilities (Hurenkamp et al., 2012; Verhoeven and Tonkens, 2013).

While there is much debate about the scope and desirability of the acclaimed transition to a new type of public domain, it is undeniable that many social innovations have emerged in informal care, communities and local governance (see, e.g. Beunderman et al., 2012; Hilhorst and Van der Lans, 2013). These include hundreds of community trust and social enterprises taking over public buildings and services, a widespread turn to neighbourhood-based team-working and family group conferencing in social care, and countless citizen initiatives aimed at improving physical, social and ecological living conditions. Facilitating these requires a turn to what Dutch academics and advisory boards have coined ‘government participation’ (see Van der Steen et al., 2014): whereas citizens used to be invited to participate in policy processes, now public professionals have to find ways to facilitate and adapt to what citizens do and need. The underlying assumption is that citizens have a lot of energy and capacities for creating a ‘do it yourself democracy’ and a ‘vibrant society’ but are held back by bureaucratic structures and regulations, a desire for top-down control and accountability and an inability to share public powers and resources (Beunderman et al., 2012; Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken, 2013, 2015; Raad voor Maatschappelijke Ontwikkeling, 2013; Wetenschappelijke Raas voor Regeringsbeleid, 2012).

In light of this discourse, the Municipality of Amsterdam adopted a city-wide policy of ‘area-focused working’ to stimulate public agencies in prioritising the dynamics, problems and strengths of local areas over policy guidelines, organisational procedures and professional routines (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2013). One successful example of this is the Neighbourhood Practice Team (Buurt Praktijk Team – BPT) in Amsterdam-West. In 2011, the first BPT (Columbusplein) was launched as an experimental, temporal investment in an area of multiple deprivation where over the course of ten years a group of troublesome youngsters had developed into a well-organised criminal network despite the collaborative efforts of 14 public agencies. In two years, it managed to disband the group, enable residents to take charge again of public spaces, and branch out this transformative process to domestic problems, school performance, cleanliness, sports, poverty and business climate. It received much media attention and widespread political and organisational support as it was widely appraised as an unprecedented success and exemplary innovation in neighbourhood governance (see Stadsdeel West, 2013). This triggered the launch of BPTs in adjacent neighbourhoods (Landlust; Bosleeuw-Midden; Gibraltar) and throughout the city.

As a detailed analysis of the BPT approach and activities is provided elsewhere (Bartels, 2016), here I will give a brief overview to explain what makes it a social innovation. A BPT consists of talented professionals mandated by their organisations to work in a neighbourhood and with residents to ‘do what’s necessary’. This seemingly elusive notion comprises a clear set of situated practices: creating a sense of urgency, being constantly present and approachable in the neighbourhood, listening to what residents are saying and have to offer, developing a shared focus, initiating activities to generate change in small steps, breaking through engrained patterns and continuing to go through all these steps iteratively. For example, by organising a ‘mommy and daddy in the playground day’, the first BPT got a lot of children and parents to use the square again rather than having it dominated by the group of troublesome youngsters. And with its ‘Fresh in Class’ initiative, team members strolled through the neighbourhood in the evenings to get children to go to bed earlier and no longer fall asleep in class or developing a habit of causing nuisance in the street. BPTs can thus be classified as social innovation: they develop in-depth understanding of the unmet needs and hidden dynamics of neighbourhoods, empower residents to change things around, and transform relationships within and amongst public agencies and communities.

These innovative practices generated tensions with institutional actors who found it difficult to grasp, appreciate and accommodate what the BPTs were doing (Bartels, 2014a; Stadsdeel West, 2013, 2014). Therefore, my research project aimed to enable public professionals, residents and policy makers involved with BPTs to better understand how it works and navigate its dynamics of change and resistance. During four months of fieldwork, I actively participated in the daily practice of the BPTs to produce immediately usable insights, experiences and artefacts. Specifically, I carried out an evaluation of one BPT, co-organised a resident initiative in another area, and conducted an analysis of the needs of youngsters with a team of youth workers in a third neighbourhood. Drawing on a repertoire of ethnographic and action research methods (Greenwood and Levin, 1998; Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007; Shdaimah et al., 2009), I was present in neighbourhoods and local offices every day, participated in countless meetings and activities, conducted 16 in-depth interviews, shadowed three team leaders, went on joint neighbourhood walks, wrote reports, and organised eight evaluation meetings and workshops (methods are reported in detail in Bartels, 2014b). Using stories I collected and episodes I experienced, I now present three highly representative narratives sourced from my field notes that illustrate how the double bind manifests itself in the relational dynamics of the BPTs.

Relational and rationalistic evaluation

BPTs face a double bind when negotiating multiple meanings of its innovative practices as they are evaluated and constantly forced to justify these in a rationalistic administrative system. Consider for instance how the BPT active in the area Bosleeuw-Midden is subtly but significantly contested during its evaluation.

Bosleeuw-Midden was not suffering from alarming problems but there were worrying signs about high levels of anti-social behaviour (especially amongst children) and lack of community engagement and connections. Therefore, the BPT did not, like the other teams, get a full political mandate but only two part-time allocated team leaders. After six months, the team is up for an intermediate evaluation. May-Britt, the BPTs policy coordinator, organises a world café-like meeting with the two team leaders, their administrative worker, myself, and their line manager. As the latter is a sceptic of the BPT approach, May-Britt thought it best to evaluate in a safe setting with a small group. In alternating pairs, we discuss three questions (Why did the team start? What has been done? What should we do next?). Although we fill the wall with flipchart sheets with detailed answers to these questions, our final conversation turns into a debate about the value of the BPT approach rather than the substantive achievements and challenges of this particular team. The line manager subtly belittles the team’s success in getting two Moroccan mothers to organise weekly activities for children and parents (an immense and transformative achievement in this particular area) and provocatively questions how long you really need a BPT before things can ‘go back to normal’. Afterwards, the BPT leaders and May-Britt are dissatisfied and deeply upset about how the value of their work and approach was once again delegitimised and belittled. (Field notes, 26 September 2013)

Notwithstanding attempts to accommodate the sceptical line manager, the evaluation ends up in a positional debate and frustration rather than productive deliberation and joint decisions. This unproductive dynamic also characterises evaluations of other BPTs as well as daily conversations with managers and colleagues with no direct involvement. Its dynamic (informal, improvised and situated) practices are not easily captured in static conventional planning and evaluation mechanisms. BPT members therefore constantly have to justify and defend what they do and why to actors keeping to a hierarchical administrative system and rationalistic worldview. May-Britt could recite numerous disconcerting examples of how her efforts to accommodate her line manager’s need for instrumental evaluation were met with sceptical remarks playing down the value of her work and requests to provide fixed timelines, standard procedures and pre-determined results. This feels like stepping out of the trenches with a white flag and immediately getting shot down.

Facilitating relational evaluation in the face of such hierarchical dynamics generates a double bind for social innovators to promote yet not impose their self-assessments. BPTs try to foster integrative dynamics with institutional actors by jointly evaluating what they are doing differently, what difference this makes, and what institutional implications this has. They use participatory methods for appreciating the holistic, experiential and situated nature of their practices as well as nurturing constructive relationships with institutional actors. However, this gives the latter a platform to belittle and delegitimise BPTs and confirm the legitimacy of institutionalised ways of working, thinking and organising. The immense relational potential of connecting with ‘just’ two mothers for transforming a neighbourhood is lost on, and easy prey for, someone used to specifying goals and activities in advance, measuring outputs in rational or quantifiable terms, and holding people accountable according to fixed procedures. More productive relational dynamics would therefore require substantive change in institutionalised language, methods and expectations involved with evaluating.

Empowerment and defensiveness

BPTs also face a double bind when confronting hegemonic institutions as they enact innovative practices in interaction with public professionals inclined to uphold the status quo. In the next story, the involvement of the BPT Landlust in an adversarial participatory planning process empowers residents but triggers defensiveness amongst the professionals in charge.

Besides an alarming level of anti-social behaviour by a group of youngsters, another reason for the start of the BPT Landlust was a conflict between public professionals and a group of active residents about the renovation of the main square. While the professionals carefully prepare and enact a participatory planning process, at some point the residents express deep frustration about not being listened to or taken seriously. When they escalate this to the City District Board, the professionals are stunned about the residents’ accusations and feel misunderstood and bypassed. Ron (the BPT team leader) learns from conversations with the residents that they want a broader view on the role of the square in the neighbourhood – including the buildings on and around it (community centre, elementary school, youth centre) and helping to holistically address the anti-social behaviour and related issues. This is beyond the mandate of the planners involved, who had been focusing on the details of different design options. After the Board broadens the mandate, the professionals set up a new process and appoint a different designer to better listen to the residents’ demands. Ron keeps on mediating in the process to stimulate mutual understanding and better relationships, and eventually a new design is jointly agreed upon. The residents are very happy with this outcome and especially praise Ron for carefully listening to what they were asking for. However, both during and after the process, the planners loathe Ron’s presence and attribute the positive dynamics and outcomes entirely to their broadened mandate and own interventions. (Field notes, October 2013)

Even though the conflict is resolved and everybody is happy with the outcomes of the participatory process, it damages relationships with the public professionals in charge and generates defensiveness towards the BPT. Unlike the residents, the professionals do not feel empowered but betrayed by Ron as, in their eyes, he sided with residents who had actively resisted and aggressively criticised them. For years, they continue to depict him as an untrustworthy and incompetent colleague and the BPT as an unclear and useless approach. Such defensiveness also emerges in various other situations, with some colleagues bursting into tears during meetings or informally telling embittered and wrathful stories. BPTs are legitimised with the diagnosis that existing agencies are unable to resolve issues in an area. Public professionals can interpret this as criticism on their hard work, lack of recognition for their good intentions or imposition of a new, elusive practice, rather than an invitation to learn and change.

Empowering everyone in the face of such competitive dynamics creates a double bind for innovators to accommodate institutional actors without letting them dominate. Disrupting the status quo and upsetting colleagues invested in it is a necessary evil for relationally confronting and creatively integrating differences but can also turn into counter-hegemony. BPTs try to cultivate integrative dynamics by facilitating professionals and residents in joint inquiry of their situation and interpersonal dynamics. Both in deliberative meetings and day-to-day interactions, they are encouraged to explore shared interests, pragmatic solutions and underlying patterns as well as recognise one another’s capacities, constraints and feelings. However, institutional actors are inclined to dominate conversations with their professional views and emotional needs rather than integrating these with residents’ views and needs. It is all too common for professionals to resort to defensiveness, emotional accusations and adversarial posturing when facing subversive residents rather than inquiring whether their less than kind attitude perhaps is an expression of frustration with the umpteenth unresponsive participatory project. More productive relational dynamics would involve substantive change in institutionalised emotions, demeanour and powers involved with empowering.

Experiential inclusion and detachment

Finally, BPTs face a double bind when embedding their innovation in multi-scalar systems as they try to include an increasing number of people who lack direct experience with their innovative practices. This story reveals how adopting the BPT approach in a team of youth workers generates resistances amongst all stakeholders.

When extra money becomes available to address the needs of youngsters in a deprived neighbourhood, stakeholders plan to do this according to the BPT approach. However, a six months long planning and coordination process unfolds which one public professional later calls a ‘snake pit’. The City District introduces and then withdraws a policy document filled with abstract assumptions, hierarchical decisions and pre-structured solutions; two youth work agencies engage in competitive bidding despite many meetings to coordinate their efforts; and eventually take three months to draft a joint plan. When a team of youth workers finally starts, they initially resist the proposal the team leader and I make to have open-ended conversations (a key element of the BPT approach) because they find this ‘unclear’, ‘already know what’s going on’ and believe ‘youngsters need structure’. Eventually they reluctantly agree but for the first weeks report only bad experiences with the approach and produce little new insights. Also, the managers and executives of the agencies do not quite grasp why we need to use this approach, question whether its findings will not conflict with organisational interests, and struggle with their own role. This gradually changes because our shared experiences of going out on the street and listening to youngsters leads to a shared image of their needs, enthusiasm about the approach and a strong desire to keep on collaborating. But in the ensuing months new hierarchical decisions by the City District and interagency competition over who gets the lead risk that our hard-won findings and collaboration get lost. (Field notes, November 2013–January 2016)

Although the need to scale-up and embed the BPT approach is widely supported, it proves exceedingly difficult for all stakeholders to actually enact it in their daily practices. BPTs manage to successfully transform specific neighbourhoods, but struggle to embed their approach beyond that within the urban governance system. Policy makers, middle-level managers and street-level workers enact interrelated practices of hierarchical policy making, competition over funding and status, and engrained routines and knowledge. The unintended consequence that materialises is upholding the status quo and greatly delaying actual encounters with youngsters and experiences with their life world. Even though a productive process and outcomes eventually emerge, these do not transform engrained habits and institutions that detach stakeholders from opening up to the experiential lessons that the situation offers.

Increasing inclusion in the face of such hierarchical and competitive dynamics implies a double bind for innovators to engage institutional actors in experiences that invite but not enforce learning and change. BPTs try to promote integrative dynamics by enticing them to experience how it works, what its value is and what needs to be done in the situation at hand. This involves asking for their participation in figuring out what sort of support, training and organisational changes they would need to deal with the complex webs of institutions and habits they are entangled in. But while first-hand experiences trigger some to learn and change, institutionalised ways of thinking, acting and organising keep most of them at a (physical, mental, emotional and social) distance of the situation. Institutional actors tend to be unwilling to recognise the need for change, especially when lacking organisational and financial conditions (including job security) in which it is safe to experiment, make mistakes, admit problems, take a position of not knowing, and uncover interconnections. More productive relational dynamics would involve substantive change in institutionalised attitudes to, processes of, and conditions for experiential learning.

Conclusion

Policy discourse depicts social innovation as a normative good for urban governance reform in the context of massive austerity pressures to do more with less. However, in practice it is constantly contested, challenged and resisted by institutionalised ways of working. I argue that simultaneously stimulating and inhibiting social innovation creates a double bind of conflicting communicative signals that trigger defensive responses and weaken capacities for joint sense making and sustainable change. Assessing and improving relational dynamics of change and resistance is therefore crucial for more productive and transformative social innovation. Analysing a case of innovative neighbourhood governance in Amsterdam, I specify meta-theoretical concepts and communicative practices that explain how the double bind both inhibits and necessitates substantive change of urban governance institutions.

An important contribution of this article is that it offers an empirically detailed and theoretically grounded study of the relational dynamics involved in social innovation. Instead of the often resorted to analytical strategies of sanguine appraisal or radical critique, it demonstrates how these interpersonal processes are enacted and what fosters and inhibits change. Responding to Jessop et al.’s (2013) call for a relational meta-theoretical framework, it provides a conceptual language for analysing relational dynamics and evaluating them. Moreover, building on recent work in this direction (e.g. Bartels, 2015; Stout and Love, 2015) it shows that relational process ontology provides philosophical concepts and communicative practices that form a fruitful alternative to currently hegemonic neoliberal governmentality. With the notion of the double bind, finally, it extends our understanding of the double-sided nature of social innovation (Swyngedouw, 2005) in terms of relational dynamics of resistance and change and associated capacities and reforms.

Besides the context-specificity of its single case study, however, a key limitation of this study lies in its limited evidence of and guidance for successful transformation. Future research should focus on identifying ways to better navigate and possibly overcome the double bind of social innovation. Studies of relational dynamics in other contexts, comparative analyses and monitoring of the impact of social innovation over time would be welcome. My meta-theoretical framework could be used to identify other resistances, dimensions, practices and ways to organise for more productive communication and sustainable change. Further understanding and transforming of public officials would also be imperative.

In a way, this article is a cautionary tale. If governments ask for social innovation, they need to be prepared to welcome substantive change – fundamental relational transformations of hierarchical and competitive dynamics that typically dominate (urban) governance. Rather than upholding seemingly conducive neoliberal discourse that limits social innovation to marginal change, they need to fundamentally reform hegemonic institutions such as rationalistic evaluation, defensive behaviour and experiential detachment. In turn, social innovators must be prepared to not only introduce new relational approaches and practices but also to transform resistances they run into. Besides focusing on better results (substantive change), they should improve interpersonal dynamics by meeting institutional needs, helping everyone feel empowered, and asking for participation in figuring out what they would need to change (relational process change). As such, we can move away from either reproducing existing institutions or radically rejecting them toward enacting integrative dynamics that foster transformative change.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

An earlier draft of this article was presented during a seminar at the Tilburg School of Politics and Public Administration. I thank the organisers and participants for their supportive comments. I am grateful to Imrat Verhoeven, three anonymous reviewers and the Editor for their perceptive and constructive comments. Finally, I am indebted to all research participants, especially to Martien van Rijn, May-Britt Jansen, Joep van Egmond, Ron de Groot, Simen van der Goot and Enrico Kruydenhof for their extensive support.

Funding

This research was funded by a grant from the Municipality of Amsterdam.

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