In an era marked by intersecting crises, from widening social inequalities to environmental crisis and democratic fragility, the search for transformative responses is urgent. Conventional, siloed, top-down approaches struggle to match the complexity of these challenges. Against this backdrop, the intertwined domains of social innovation and participatory governance offer ethically grounded avenues for inclusive development, not as purely technical fixes but as social and political processes shaped by who participates and whose knowledge counts (Moulaert et al., 2013; Murray et al., 2010). Yet, despite growing policy interest, the practical and ethical mechanics of how these paradigms intersect to produce equitable outcomes remain underexplored.This special issue of the Social Enterprise Journal foregrounds that premise. By convening scholars and practitioners across management, agronomy, social work, climate governance, technology and community development, it examines how participatory governance can structure the co-production of knowledge by bringing together policymakers, researchers, professionals and community members into collective and democratic development processes, that are both ethically thorough and practically actionable, producing solutions that are context-sensitive and equitable. This focus on the interdisciplinary co-production speaks directly to the core mission of the Social Enterprise Journal, which aims to bridge theory and practice in ways that matter for organisational strategy, policy design and, ultimately, community well-being.Our core theme, “Social Innovation and Participatory Governance: Ethical Pathways for Inclusive Development”, insists that innovation’s value depends on its governance: procedures of inclusion that secure the meaningful participation of all stakeholder groups, especially the least advantaged, the recognition of diverse forms of expertise and attention to power relations in how problems are framed and solutions implemented (Galego et al., 2022). Democratising social innovation also requires grappling with knowledge hierarchies and legacies of exclusion, including calls to decolonise knowledge production and evaluation (Cummings et al., 2021).Thus, social innovation is not measured only by its immediate, novel or material outputs but also by its ability to reconfigure social contexts and relationships by expanding people’s empowerment and opportunities (Ziegler, 2018). Within this framing, ethical appraisal attends to plural actors and values, diverse conversion factors and potential value conflicts, thereby orienting this special issue toward both scholarly advancement and real-world impact (Bustamante Donas, 2013; J. Ims and Zsolnai, 2014).The response to our call underscores the vibrancy of this agenda. We received a wide array of submissions from across the globe, spanning qualitative case studies, comparative designs and mixed methods approaches. Following a double-blind review, we are pleased to present seven articles that collectively map critical tensions and promising pathways at the intersection of innovation and governance. Each contribution advances the theme by clarifying core questions, mobilising valid methods and offering empirically grounded insights with implications for management practice, policy instruments and community-level change. Together, they illuminate how ethical imperatives actively shape governance arrangements and innovation practices, by reconfiguring relationships, redistributing epistemic authority and opening routes toward more democratic and sustainable outcomes.Social innovation is polysemic and contested across communities of practice and research, but also across time and fields. While past usages ranged from social reform to contested, politicised projects, contemporary syntheses typically converge on three interlinked pillars: meeting neglected human needs, transforming social relations and enabling socio-political empowerment through collective action (Galego et al., 2022). Scholarship also notes that social innovation’s ambiguity stems both from its evolving analytical status and its overuse as a policy buzzword, which risks masking its emancipatory intent (Moulaert et al., 2013).A first, a foundational tension opposes output-centric and process-centric views. Policy and practice handbooks, situated at the intersection of the social economy, social entrepreneurship and social enterprise, stress methods to design, develop and grow social innovation initiatives, emphasising pipelines from idea to implementation, scaling and ultimately systemic change (Murray et al., 2010). By contrast, institutionalist traditions conceive social innovation as collective action, which densifies social relations and can enable socio-political transformation, with governance understood as new modes of governing that include participatory and co-productive decision-making (Galego et al., 2022; Moulaert et al., 2013). In this processual lens, who participates and how authority is shared are constitutive of social innovation’s value, not merely instruments for delivery (Cloutier, 2003).A second tension contrasts managerial instrumentalization with democratic transformation. Scoping evidence highlights both the inclusive potential of social innovation and the risk of neoliberal appropriations that recast social innovation as a substitute for welfare obligations or as “Janus-faced” participation that leaves power relations intact (Galego et al., 2022). In response, the empowered-participatory governance tradition proposes designs that devolve authority, connect local units to higher tiers and support deliberative problem-solving, aiming to be both participatory and effective (Fung and Wright, 2001). At its more transformative edge, social innovations initiatives are most credible when territorially embedded, mobilising networks to alter decision-making arrangements and address basic needs and alienated rights (Klein et al., 2016).A third tension concerns levels and loci of change. Syntheses in the Centre for Research on Social Innovations in Montréal (CRISES) distinguish social innovation oriented to the individual, the territory and the enterprise and argue that social innovation can be identified by its novelty, its collaborative process requiring user participation and its contribution to the well-being of individuals and communities (Cloutier, 2003). This multi-level view emphasises place-based collective action and sits at the social innovation participatory governance interface: democratic co-production can enhance relevance and legitimacy, yet it must be institutionally designed to avoid inefficiency or tokenism (Fung and Wright, 2001).Beyond these three core tensions, recent political developments in several countries introduce an additional layer of contestation for social innovation. We note the growth of populist parties (of both left and right) and an emerging literature which explores the implications for social innovation and for aspects of governance and ethics. This has been already the subject of work in respect of public sector innovation and practice (Borins, 2018; Murdock and Barber, 2020). The implications of populism for innovation generally have also been explored (Tang et al., 2024). Recently, a research handbook on Populism featured an entry which examined the impact of populism in terms of social movements. The focus of populism (whether of left or right) upon reflecting “the will of the people” and opposing “elites” could raise questions of how this may influence social innovation and how the governance and ethical context is constructed (della Porta and Portos, 2024). Possibly, populism may even encourage more social innovation but whether it is viewed as positive would depend on the political perspective of the observer.Across these strands, social innovation is distinctive in both means and ends, as it pursues new solutions and new social relations (Murray et al., 2010) under conditions that are simultaneously institutional, ethical and political. Its evaluation is therefore necessarily plural, balancing outcomes with participatory quality, governance arrangements and ethical as well as democratic transformative reach.We treat participatory governance as the institutional design of “new ways of governing” (Galego et al., 2021, p. 265) that brings policymakers, professionals, researchers and community members into co-construction beyond hierarchical command-and-control (Massey and Johnston-Miller, 2016). In democratic innovation research, these designs deepen citizens’ opportunities for participation, deliberation and influence across policy and social innovation cycles (Descloux et al., 2025; Elstub and Escobar, 2019).A central debate opposes consultative arrangements, where stakeholders are heard but exert little influence, to co-productive arrangements, where authority is shared across commissioning, design, delivery and evaluation (Arnstein, 1969). A systematic review of evidence shows that “co-creation/co-production” has been applied to different actors (individuals, groups, collectives) and stages of the social innovation process, with deeper co-production reconfiguring roles rather than adding one-off consultations (Voorberg et al., 2014). The same review notes a persistent evaluation gap: studies often report activities and antecedents, while outcomes and effects on decision power remain underexamined. Similar dynamics have also been documented in the use of design-based methods such as the Design Sprint, which operationalise co-production by temporarily suspending hierarchical roles and structuring collective problem-solving across professional and user groups (Felix, 2020).Linking participatory governance to social innovation helps ensure that solutions are context-sensitive, inclusive and legitimate. Under governance syntheses, social innovation is not only about producing solutions but about configuring decision arenas and social relations through which those solutions are co-produced (Elstub and Escobar, 2019; Galego et al., 2022). From a public-governance angle, evolving from “governance” to “governance for social innovation” requires clarifying how state, market and civil society share roles; otherwise, participation risks remaining peripheral to the core of policy and organisational change (Massey and Johnston-Miller, 2016). At the same time, the literature warns against instrumental participation. These cautions underline that design choices, rather than participation per se, determine whether governance anchors democratisation or merely legitimises pre-set agendas.To avoid tokenism while preserving effectiveness, classic empowered participatory governance emphasises combining devolution with coordination and deliberation with accountability (Fung and Wright, 2001). Recent work argues for rebalancing a narrow focus on deliberative legitimacy with participatory capacity for change, so that processes mobilise empowerment and implementation, not just input (Escobar and Bua, 2025). Taken together, these insights specify that, as a democratic anchor, participatory governance specifies who participates, when in the policy and social innovation cycle and with what power. When these design parameters are explicit, social innovation gains relevance, legitimacy and traction; when they are not, participation slides toward symbolism.In this Special Issue, ethics is treated as constitutive of social innovation, shaping both what counts as a meaningful innovation and how it should be practised. Bustamante Donas’ philosophical work (2013) on social innovation highlights ethical “vectors” that surface in collaborative settings, such as communities of knowledge, democracy and citizen participation, dialogue between popular and scientific knowledges and holistic pedagogy, through which empowerment dynamics emerge beyond standard metrics. These vectors suggest that evaluation cannot be reduced to outputs alone; it must attend to how knowledge is co-produced and to the social learning processes that innovations set in motion.Business ethics scholarship reinforces this orientation by showing that exemplary social innovation cases prioritise social and humanitarian goals (e.g. minimising suffering, empowering people, strengthening local communities) and endure when they are sensitive to local cultures and animated by an ethos of the common good (J. Ims and Zsolnai, 2014). Their comparative analysis of well-known initiatives indicates that success hinges less on product novelty than on goals, means and the user capabilities required, thereby foregrounding context, values and empowerment as core evaluative criteria. User-centred design approaches have further demonstrated how experiential knowledge can be structurally embedded into innovation processes, reinforcing both ethical participation and epistemic justice beyond consultative formats (Felix et al., 2022).The capability approach (CA) deepens this normative compass. Ziegler (2018) positions the CA as a framework that places justice and democracy at the core of social innovation by shifting attention from resources and aggregate indicators to people’s real freedoms (capabilities) to achieve valued functioning and exercise agency. This implies recognising human diversity, plural values and the conversion factors that condition what different people can do with the same means; it also entails reconfiguring the social contexts, such as institutions, networks and cognitive frames, that enable or constrain capabilities. The author further notes a policy gap: while social innovation is officially endorsed as participatory, practical policies that realise co-determination remain limited and the least advantaged often lack the capability to associate, which calls for designs that strengthen collective voice.From a practice-oriented vantage point, ethics emerges in the articulation between high-impact projects and democratic ideals. Scholars across applied fields conceptualise innovation as the development of responses to evolving social challenges while reaffirming foundational values (participation, well-being) and rehabilitating community expertise as a criterion of quality (J. Ims and Zsolnai, 2014; Rullac, 2020). This perspective cautions against technocratic drift and seeks an operational characterisation of processes that is both effective and equitable. Finally, democratic innovation research argues that ethical legitimacy (inclusion, epistemic justice, considered judgment) must be matched by capacity for change, resources and implementation, if participation is to be more than symbolic. 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