Fostering social innovation within transformative partnerships: The case of Alianza Shire and Lab Shire

Abstract

The achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represents an ambitious commitment that emphasizes the need to activate innovation through the creation of multi-stakeholder partnerships. Growing and changing demands for applied social innovation could be the necessary trigger for considering partnerships as the main contributor to systemic change. Currently, multi-stakeholder transformative partnerships are considered the new institutional infrastructure to address complex problems.
“Alianza Shire: Energy Access to refugees and host communities” is seen as an example of transformation-oriented innovation in partnerships. It is the first multi-stakeholder partnership for humanitarian action in Spain, with the objective of developing innovative solutions for improving refugees and displaced populations’ access to energy. It developed a pilot project from 2014 to 2017, in the refugee camp of Adi-Harush (Shire, Northern Ethiopia), where approximately 8.000 people lived. Currently, and until 2021, Alianza Shire is escalating the pilot project into a second phase, in which work is being done in four refugee camps and their respective host communities, reaching more than 40,000 people.
The work that Alianza Shire has carried out since 2014, as well as the numerous previous experiences of its members in access to basic services, makes it a demonstrative experience of how new relationship schemes and collaboration structures based on multi-stakeholder partnerships. However, it lacked a space in which learning systematization and innovation happened in different levels.
After a period of professional training at the brokering entity of Alianza Shire, I have been able to study the application of theoretical concepts of social innovation, and the aspiration towards transformation within a partnership itself, through the design and implementation of an innovation lab for learning systematization and knowledge sharing. Hence, this Final Master's Paper focuses on contrasting Alianza Shire with the definitions, processes and trends that frame social innovation, laying the groundwork for the introduction of Lab Shire as a proposal to drive this partnership towards social innovation.