Cameron Tonkinwise is asking … “is social innovation a means of circumventing politics?”
“….what happens if design-based social innovation is not just a way of avoiding conventional, explicit politics, but a way of undermining politics altogether? What if scaling up existing innovations with redesign is not just about helping people temporarily frustrated with the inertial cowardice of elected representatives, but a way to make more or less permanently redundant the need for any government to find a way to negotiate political responses to current crises?”
Do read the whole thing. It raises some of the interesting political questions that are likely to arise during the coming months as we chew over various political innovation that are going to be on offer here. Is it really the case that …
“The rhetoric …..is all about doing services better, but in ways that just happen to also save the government money and, more importantly, withdraw governments irrevocably from such services.”
Is there a cross-cutting community of people who just think that politics can be done better – or does every innovation have its own hidden agenda?
