Social-Ecological Innovations

Current natural resources management practices, the threats posed by climate change and the globalized economy risk to increasingly undermine the fragile balance between social and ecological needs, thus calling for novel strategies and solutions to support local communities´ resilience via sustainable social-ecological innovations in the bioeconomy.

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Photo: Bjørn Egil Flø

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.