Urban Water Transformations: Can social innovations and entrepreneurships transform governance and citizenship in developing cities?

Global environmental change and increased resource consumptionare
driving the need for urban water transformations.
The complexity of this challenge calls for strategic action
to advance alternative governance and citizenship practices.
This paper reviews literature on social innovations and
social entrepreneurship and conceptually integrates it with
insights from sustainability transitions scholarship to explain
how social innovators and entrepreneurs influence transition
dynamics. It proposes seven core ingredients (social mission,
creative innovations, entrepreneurialism, social networks,
hybridisation, social value-creation, and social change) and
four key processes (opportunity recognition, resource mobilisation,
empowering and embedding, and learning and adaptation)
to explain the influence of the social innovation and
entrepreneurship within the context of inadequate sanitation in
developing countries. The results show that social innovations
and entrepreneurships affect transformational changes in
governance and citizenship while creating multi-dimensional
value in the areas of social inclusion, economic development
and environmental sustainability.