Social-Ecological Innovations

At NIBIO, we understand social-ecological innovations as new ways of:

• managing and using natural resources sustainably
• voicing local communities´ needs
• designing bio-based value chains and business models
• new governance designs.

Thus, we work on and with social-ecological innovations in the bioeconomy to:

• boost local-value creation and redistribution, social welfare, public health and food safety and social inclusion
• ensure the balance between social and environmental needs
• preserve ecosystem services
• re-designing governance frameworks to open-up decision-making processes and empower societal actors, including local communities, to co-identify and co-create sustainable solutions. 

We employ a diverse and interdisciplinary set of methods (from business modelling to multi-stakeholders´ participatory methods and ecosystems analysis) to study and facilitate sustainable social-ecological innovations.