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While social innovation has traditionally emphasised social sustainability, it also presents potential for the mitigation of climate change by influencing social practices. This study explores how social innovation initiatives address social practices to mitigate climate change. Our qualitative study in an affluent setting, a Swedish municipality with high emissions, led to the identification of four dimensions relevant for climate mitigation: SIIs’ social motives, inspiration of others, beneficiary participation, and use of artefacts. Social motives for climate relevant social ends focused on altering the meaning of practices while SIIs’ had social means focused on changing meaning, competences, and materials of emission-intensive practices.

Environmental challenges, like climate change, are becoming increasingly more severe. The current solutions, which have mainly relied on marketdriven, technology-based innovation to address environmental challenges, have proven insufficient. Instead, solutions must focus on altering the problematic activities and behaviors that have put our planet on its current unsustainable trajectory. One concept with potential to describe how activities and behaviors can be altered is social innovation. Social innovation is defined here as innovations in social practice that have relevance for addressing societal challenges. Social innovation can be enabled by social innovation initiatives, intentional attempts to alter problematic social practices with the aim of addressing a societal challenge. This dissertation aims to increase the understanding of how social innovation can address environmental challenges. To fulfill this purpose, this dissertation explores how social innovation can alter social practices to address environmental challenges. Then, to scrutinize this potential, the consequences of a strong sustainability perspective on social innovation are investigated.

Four articles were written to help fulfill the aim of this dissertation. First, an empirical paper explored how social innovation initiatives in the Nordic countries can potentially alter social practices to address the sustainable development goals. Second, a literature review scrutinized the current social innovation literature in relation to strong sustainability, leading to a research agenda. Third, an empirical paper focusing specifically on climate change as a pressing environmental challenge investigated social innovation initiatives’ potential for altering social practices. Fourth, social innovation is conceptualized according to strong sustainability. The main findings indicate that social innovation initiatives’ potential for addressing environmental challenges stems from them having a purpose that focuses on addressing societal challenges by introducing solutions that can alter social practices to be relevant for addressing environmental challenges. Through initiatives’ social ends and means, they alter the given meanings, competences, and materials used in social practices. Further, social innovation has potential for strong sustainability when social practices are innovated to recognize the criticality of nature, protect vital environmental functions, the hierarchy of importance, and lead to coexistence with nature. Finally, through social learning new social practices can be scaled and potentially lead to social change that can help provide a pathway for enabling an imaginable strong sustainable society.

New technologies, market-based solutions, and regulation have proven inadequate in remedying today's human caused ecological crises. This suggests that detrimental social practices need to be fundamentally changed. While social innovation is one possible approach for such change, a comprehensive picture of research on social innovation in relation to ecological challenges is missing. Therefore, with an emphasis on so-called strong sustainability, this article's purpose was to investigate social innovation's potential in relation to ecological crises, to identify important gaps, and advance research implications. A systematic literature review of social innovation research that address environmental issues was carried out, and the resulting literature was analyzed according to sustainability and five dimensions of social innovation. To reap more of social innovation's potential in our time of ecological crises, we suggest a move in social innovation research towards strong sustainability and propose such research avenues within each of the five dimensions of social innovation: conceptualization, environmental needs and challenges, key resources, capabilities, and constraints, types of governance, networks and actors, and, finally, process dynamics for strongly sustainable social innovation.

Increasingly, social innovation has been called upon for addressing societal challenges. However, its application to environmental challenges has been limited, despite evident negative environmental developments. We advocate for the role of social innovation and a strong sustainability perspective in response to environmental challenges. Our purpose is to develop a version of social innovation consistent with strong sustainability. This conceptualization is based on four principles deduced from strong sustainability: criticality of nature, protection of vital environmental functions, hierarchy of needs, and coexistence. Then, we use illustrative examples to discuss the practical implications that strong sustainability has for social innovation initiatives. We conclude by discussing future research avenues for analyzing strongly sustainable social innovations.

Social innovation has been gaining increased attention as a solution for achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Considering the implications that regional differences have in both interpreting and attaining the SDGs through social innovation, this study focuses on the Nordic countries. This paper investigates how social innovation initiatives (SIIs) potentially alter social practices to achieve the SDGs. After analyzing 159 Nordic SIIs, it was found that few SIIs addressed environmentally relevant SDGs. These Nordic SIIs were mainly driven by social enterprises or non-profits. Primarily, SIIs introduced services and products that can lead to altered social practices to mainly achieve social and economic relevant SDGs. It was also found that the beneficiaries’ role was not always central. Future research must focus more on SIIs’ role in addressing environmentally relevant SDGs in addition to the role of using market mechanisms for introducing social innovation.