Social Innovation towards Sustainability: Embracing Contemporary Challenges for Regional Development

The Portuguese section of European Regional Science Association (ERSA) invites you to participate to the 25th APDR workshop “Social Innovation Towards Sustainability: Embracing Contemporary Challenges for Regional Development”.

 This event intends to promote an inter-sector dialogue among researchers, activists, local, regional and national policy-makers, associations, non-governmental organizations, practitioners of social innovation and social entrepreneurs.

The workshop is organized by APDR – Portuguese Association for Regional Development and CES – Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra.

Call for papers

The Local Organising Committee invites researchers, activists, public officials and social entrepreneurs to submit proposals for contributions to the workshop. Submissions might be based on formal research or on concrete activist, community or public policy initiatives.

The workshop is particularly interested in proposals related to these thematic fields:

• On innovation: studies, reflections and examples about innovation (s) that, particularly, are concerned to emphasize sustainability and regional development, such as social innovation, grassroots innovation, transformative innovation, among others;
• On transformation: studies, reflections and examples focused on sustainability transitions, multi-level perspective, transferability and scaling-up, and their relationships with innovation and regional development;
• Doing It: Examples of real-world practices in developing innovative practices that address social and environmental needs, such as sustainable intentional communities (ecovillages), smart-cities, eco-cities, cities in transition, transition movements, living laboratories, NGOs, territorial and local development agencies, public policies, among others, that may instigate regional development.

Abstracts Submission Deadline: 31 January 2020