Theoretical and policy failures in technologies and innovation for social inclusion: The cases of social housing, renewal energy and food production in Argentina

HERNÁN THOMAS; LUCAS BECERRA; MARIANO FRESSOLI; SANTIAGO GARRIDO; PAULA JUAREZ

International Research Handbook on Science, Technology and Innovation Policy in Developing Countries: Rationales and Relevance

Edward Elgar publishing

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2017;

The relationship between technology, innovation and social inclusion has recently acquired new relevance in social development forums and institutions. Benefiting from a large tradition of social movements and NGOs keen to use innovation as a tool to provide solutions for problems of inclusion, this issue has been reincorporated into the academic and policymaking debate. International institutions are exploring and promoting programs about inclusive innovation. National governments in Argentina, Brazil and India among others are also developing, to different extents, new strategies and policies.Nowadays it is possible to find a diversity of new concepts, approaches and initiatives of inclusive innovation. Those can include old appropriate or intermediate technologies experiences, new pro-poor conceptions that attempt to foster entrepreneurship or favor the involvement of multinational companies, or even approaches based on public labs developments and a solidarity economy.Despite the diversity of conceptions and models it is not clear how to avoid the failures of previous experiences in the development of technology for social inclusion. Furthermore, most of these approaches seem to face tensions between local requirements and the need to scale up, and between short-term funding and the chances to create deeper forms of social empowerment and social change.In this sense, the development of new models and conceptions of technologies for social inclusion urgently needs to review the failures of actual experiences and programs. In this paper, we want to focus on two kinds of failures common to technologies for social inclusion in Latin America. These are theoretical failures and policy failures and their connection. The former is mainly based on the use of linear models of innovation and old technology transfer conceptions that tend to reduce poverty and social exclusion to a technical problem. The latter is associated with this problem but also adds the difficulties of lack of human resources, discontinuity of funding and inability of social development institutions to conceive or sustain long-term strategies based on learning improvements.We use examples from several experiences and policies of technology for social inclusion in Argentina in the areas of social housing, renewal energy and food production. This exercise is aimed at (1) understanding what kinds of theoretical problems practitioners face, (2) how practitioners recognize the limitations and failures of their approaches and policies and (3) what kinds of strategies they attempt to implement to overcome these emerging issues.