Atlanta Conference on Science and innovation policy

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

Atlanta

Congreso; Theoretical and Policy Failures in Technologies and Innovation for Social Inclusion: The cases of social housing, renewal energy and food production in Argentina; 2013

Georgia Tech

The relation 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 re-incorporated to the academic and policy making debate. International institutions like the World Bank, the UNPD, OECD and IDB are exploring and promoting programs about inclusive innovation. National governments in Argentina, Brazil and India among others are also developing, to different extend, new strategies and policies. Nowadays 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 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 revise 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 its tied relation. The former is mainly based on the use of linear models of innovation and old conceptions of transfer of technology 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 exercised is aimed at (a) understanding what kind of theoretical problems practitioners face, (b) how practitioners recognize the limitations and failures of their approaches and policies, and (c) what kind of strategies they attempt to implement to overcome these emerging issues.