Social innovation for climate neutrality in cities: actionable pathways for policymakers

Climate neutrality is an urgent and complex challenge that cannot be solved with technological solutions alone but requires a systemic approach. Social innovation is a key lever of change in socio-technical transformations: promoting social innovation at urban level can empower communities in shaping sustainable behaviour and collective action to tackle climate change. To promote and scale social innovation at urban level to reach climate neutrality, politicians and policymakers need to be aware of effective practices that can be implemented that match a city’s readiness level. With the aim to develop a framework to support public administrations and policymakers in making informed decisions in creating favourable ecosystems of social innovation for sustainability, we triangulated the academic literature on social innovation for climate neutrality with over forty case studies to derive categories of actions, further refined, based on experts’ opinions and feedback. The resulting, theoretically based and practically relevant, social innovation actionable pathways to climate neutrality are composed of ten categories: (1) Public administration capacity building in social innovation for climate neutrality; (2) Social Innovation task force and strategy making (3) Funding for Social Innovation initiatives; (4) Citizens' capacity building; (5) City Social Innovation mapping; (6) Co-creation platforms and environments; (7) Social innovation policies; (8) Incubating and accelerating social innovations, (9) Co-creation and cross-sector partnerships, and (10) Systemic innovation approaches to climate neutrality which include social innovation. For each category, related literature and case studies are provided.