The challenges society faces today – ecological, economic, and social – are deeply interconnected and systemic.  in order to tackle these challenges, technological innovation is necessary, but not sufficient. The POTRANSI research team welcomes and invites you to think about how we also need social innovations that can transform existing power relations that are reproducing currents systems of injustice and unsustainability. Social innovations refer to changing social relations involving new ways of doing, thinking, and organising. Thousands of initiatives and movements around the world are experimenting with social innovation to contribute to more justice and sustainability. These can include sharing economy, eco-communities, or participatory democracy.

Social innovations can be transformative to the extent that they can challenge, alter, and, or, replace dominant structures and institutions that underly the root causes of societal challenges. Yet, to reach such transformative potential, social innovations require some form of diffusion, scaling, or mainstreaming. In this process, there is a clear paradox, leading us to question whether social innovations risk reproducing the very structures that they are meant to challenge, thereby possibly contradicting their original intentions. The unique contribution of this project is to approach this paradox from an explicit and unprecedented power perspective, studying how power relations are changed and, or, reproduced in processes of transformative social innovation.