I began my work at the Hope Institute just when the concept of social innovation was introduced in South Korea. I have closely observed and at times, actively participated in the growth of the social innovation ecosystem in Korea and around the world. Currently, I am a member of C.dot which transitioned into a workers’ community in the past few years, and I continue to research and explore the topic of social innovation with students at Hanyang University.
For over a decade, C.dot has introduced and facilitated exchanges around emerging trends and experiments in social innovation. In 2022, following the change in Seoul City’s political leadership, C.dot faced a pivotal moment of transition. We began experimenting with different forms of organisation and have been transforming both our governance and ownership structures ever since.
With the political change in Seoul and the national government with Yoon Suk-yeol as the president, there has been constant denial and suppression directed towards concepts such as social innovation and social economy. This has meant significant challenges and attacks on Korean civil society as well. In particular, the declaration of martial law last year painfully reminded us why social innovation has to stay as an experimental ground for our democracy. And our wake-up call last year was this – social innovation must be bolder and deeper than ever before. It must be more than project implementation and policy development. It must broaden into a systemic social change that experiments with and re-arranges governance and ownership structures.
With the new democratic government established by the people, we find ourselves asking whether social innovation can once again enter a period of revitalisation. How should the policies, institutions, experimentations of the last decade adapt and evolve in this current political turmoil and crisis?
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and under the Yoon administration, the third sector has lost much of its foundations. The constraints and attacks on civic organisations became fierce while the sector’s power and resources rapidly decreased. As a result, numerous initiatives were discontinued, existing operators have been replaced by new entities or government agencies took direct control.
Social innovation had been largely understood as ‘a new method or approach for solving societal problems’ yet as Hoonkyo Jang points out in his book, Twisted Social Innovation (2021), the narrative of social innovation was usurped by the language of public administration and became a tool for neoliberal governance. The radical and critical essence of social innovation was lost (‘twisted’). The problem-solving approaches converged towards improving efficiency within the existing power structures rather than re-arranging how resources and authorities flow. Meanwhile, meaningful governance between government, business and civil society actors was not established. As a result, ‘social innovation’ failed to secure the necessary conditions and structures for its own existence, amid turbulent waves of political changes, thus it is hard to escape criticism.
Nevertheless, experimentation and resistance continued as a way to preserve agency and public values. There were efforts to create spaces for dialogue and solidarity asking questions such as ‘Who owns the projects and spaces?’. There were places like ‘Cafe Sseul’ within the Seoul Innovation Park, which fought to stay, and initiatives like Paperback Archive, which documented the history and memories of Seoul Innovation Park. The organisations that had supported social innovations closed their doors, but many individuals who once worked in these spaces took to the streets around the National Assembly and public squares, when martial law was declared, re-organising themselves as active citizens.
Now, social innovation must move beyond the administrative experiments focused on ‘problem solving’. They must turn into radical democratic spaces that reconfigure the structure of power and relationships. We need imagination for new forms of structures and practice that truly asks how governments, civil society and businesses can distribute resources and share power. And at the centre of this renewal must always be the citizens. Citizens must no longer remain passive participants or beneficiaries. They should be empowered to directly manage, and even imagine co-owning public spaces. This means moving beyond permitted participation towards experimental practices that challenge the decision-making power and the boundaries with the administration.
Through such experiments in governance, citizens can become true agents shaping their own lives and communities. And this, I believe will be the most practical and fundamental path to restoring and strengthening every democracy in today’s political conflict, division and disorder.
Reference
Jang, Hoonkyo (2021), Twisted Social Innovation.
