Social innovations in mountainous regions: more than social work or regionalist engineering?

Innovations sociales en milieu périphérique : Plus que du travail social ou de l'ingénierie régionaliste?

Manfred Perlik (1, 2)

1 PACTE - Pacte, Laboratoire de sciences sociales
2 UNIBE - Universität Bern / University of Bern

The transformation from Fordist society to a liberal-productivist model of society touched regional development paradigms and the position of mountain areas since the 1990s. It was linked with a renaissance of Schumpeter’s thesis of the “creative destruction” which he attributed to technical and commercial innovations in the sense of economic prosperity. This paradigm of a new entrepreneurial understanding of regions substituted the former welfare state paradigm of everlasting growth and general redistribution by trickling down effects. The new model offers new possibilities for those groups of social actors and regions which are able to develop distinctive features as uniqueness and unique selling propositions to show a high performance on global markets. In this sense “marginality” which is a characteristic for several mountain areas can be an “innovative” feature but at the price of losing this characteristic. Marginal regions in general and mountains in particular should develop a clear profile and an entrepreneurial attitude to solve their specific problems in self-responsibility and subsidiarity but on responding to external demands (for specific mountain resources like leisure, water etc.).

Mots clés: social innovation; mountain; entrepreuneurial

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Manfred Perlik. Social innovations in mountainous regions: more than social work or regionalist engineering? . La montagne, territoire d'innovation, LabEx ITEM (Innovation et Territoires de montagne) Jan 2017, Grenoble, France. ⟨halshs-01446288⟩