Social innovation in an era of climate change: moving from conceptual debates to action on the ground

Against the background of climate change, there is increasing pressure to ensure meaningful engagement of social innovation in both action and research. Building upon a systemic review of the origins and contemporary conceptualisations of social innovation, this paper proposes an Ends-Means framework. Focusing on understanding how social innovation unfolds in real-world contexts, the Ends-Means framework helps to synthetise and extend existing social innovation scholarship by recognising its inherently dynamic and temporal nature. Four empirical cases in the context of the low- and middle-income countries demonstrate that social innovation is a highly dynamic and contingent process that cannot be captured in a single, fixed definition.