Innovation in development cooperation: emerging trajectories and implications for inclusive sustainable development in the 21st century

ABSTRACT

In the past twenty years, innovation has slowly, but steadily, become an important presence in development cooperation discourse and practice. The ambitious UN 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda has accelerated this trend, providing a strong framework for the main argument in favour of an innovation agenda for international development: without new ideas and innovative solutions, solving the current global development challenges will not be possible. Although this innovation-push is in line with a wider predominant view of innovation as an inherently positive force of progress, that alone does not explain when, how, and why innovation becomes a key topic in the field. This paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature, providing an initial overview of innovation in development cooperation in the post-2000s. It argues, firstly, that innovation has always been part of international development policy and practice. Secondly, it links the recent strengthening of the innovation discourse to three trends in the systemic transformation of the field: the triumph of metrics-based agendas, the ICTs and digitalization revolutions, and the role of private sector actors. It concludes by critically assessing the implications of this narrative in changing the politics of innovation towards more inclusive sustainable development policies and practices.

KEYWORDS:

• inclusive innovation
• development cooperation
• social innovation
• MDGs
• SDGs

Acknowledgements

A much earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Conference of the UK Development Studies Association 2019, in Milton Keynes, UK. I would like to thank panel convenor Prof. Theo Papaioannou (The Open University, UK) and other conference participants, who provided important insights to further develop the main argument. I would also like to thank my supervisor Prof. Luís Mah (ISEG-ULisboa), and my colleague and researcher Luís Bernardo (ISEG-ULisboa), for reviewing this work at various stages. Finally, I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the journal editor, Prof K. J. Joseph, whose constructive comments have greatly improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.cgdev.org/blog/unga-dispatch-launch-new-global-innovation-fund, accessed on 01/06/2020.

2 https://www.globalinnovationexchange.org/about, accessed on 15/12/2019.

3 https://www.gavi.org/our-alliance/about, accessed on 15/12/2019.

4 https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/11/25/20973151/givedirectly-basic-income-kenya-study-stimulus, accessed on 15/12/2019.

5 Although social innovation is today usually presented as a relatively new research field (Pol and Ville 2009; Edwards-Schachter and Wallace 2017; Caulier-Grice and Mulgan 2010), another stream of research argues that social innovation actually precedes by 200 years the innovation studies tradition, and has roots not in economics or science and technology, but in the history of religion, sociology, and political economy (Godin and Vinck 2017).

6 The increase in frequency of the terms must be analysed with caution, since both texts have very different lengths. The Millennium Declaration has a total of 2,217 words and the Transforming our World text has a total of 10,717 words. All text analysis was done using MAXQDA2018 software.

7 https://www.gsk.com/en-gb/about-us/save-the-children-partnership/, accessed on 15/12/2019.

8 http://www.fao.org/innovation/en/,accessed on 15/06/2020 / https://acceleratorlabs.undp.org/,accessed on 15/06/2020.

9 https://www.savethechildren.org/us/what-we-do/innovation/innovation-accelerator,accessed on 05/06/2020.

10 https://www.globalinnovationexchange.org/home/about,accessed on 05/06/2020.

11 https://www.idiainnovation.org/innovation,accessed on 20/06/2020.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Lisbon under its PhD Scholarship Program (BD2017); and FCT, I.P., the Portuguese national funding agency for science, research and technology, under the Project UIDB/04521/2020.