Rafael Ziegler

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• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at HEC Montréal

The dominant conception of the circular economy presents it as a politically neutral, technology-driven process of efficiency improvements and green market expansion. However, it does not consider the social embedding of circularity and thereby risks undermining the transition out of de facto linear economies. This paper begins with a critique of t...

The important yet contradictory role of innovation in society calls for a philosophy of innovation. Critically exploring innovation in relation to values, the economy and social change, Rafael Ziegler proposes a collaborative theory and practice of innovation that aims to liberate possibilities for our common futures. Following cues from the arts...

Paludiculture is the productive use of wet and rewetted peatlands. A major motivation is climate change, because drained peatlands contribute significant amounts of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The study presents an analysis of paludiculture as a critical sustainability innovation mission in the making. It is based on qualitative intervi...

This book draws upon economic and sociological theory to provide a comprehensive discussion of economic space for social innovation, addressing especially marginalized groups and the long-term projects, programmes, and policies that have emerged and evolved within and across European states. It approaches the explanatory and normative questions rai...

There is renewed interest in future making across the social sciences. These discussions refer to Kant; however, his anthropology is not in the focus. The paper seeks to fill this gap and sketch the contours of Kantian foresight in his anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. It characterizes Kantian future making as consolatory foresight, a ph...

Even though halting biodiversity loss is enshrined in the sustainable development goals (SDGs), current drivers tend to enforce tendencies in the direction of biodiversity loss and unsustainability. A focus on tackling direct drivers of biodiversity destruction surfaces social innovations relevant to management education. However, the central contr...

While innovation and market creation have long received attention for changing the direction of socio-economic development, exnovation and market destruction have received such attention only recently. Rather than assuming innovation and exnovation to be simply two sides of creative destruction processes, we aim to balance the discussion by explori...

There is renewed interest in future making across the social sciences. These discussions make reference to Kant, however, his anthropology is not in the focus. The paper seeks to fill this gap and sketch the contours of Kantian foresight in his anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. It characterizes Kantian future making as consolatory foresi...

Konzentrieren Sie sich auf gesellschaftliche Probleme, insbesondere solche, die marginalisierte Gruppen betreffen, entwickeln Sie Lösungen für diese Probleme und finden Sie Wege, Ihre Lösung zu verbreiten! Diese intuitive Reihenfolge strukturiert viele Diskussionen über soziale Innovation. Tatsächlich ist diese Vorstellung aber für gesellschaftlich...

Urban mobility infrastructures have a major impact on the everyday life of city residents. Not only their mobility, but also their health, enjoyment of life and development of lifestyle preferences are affected by them. However, inclusive participation in infrastructure planning processes is difficult to achieve. We explore a foresight approach tha...

Canonical representations of the Capabilities Approach (CA) show an economic pro­duction fonction: how can individuals convert means, such as income and resources, into an effective capability set for the choice of doings and beings they value? Agency, at the heart of many CA discussions, explores how personal traits, institutions and the environme...

Focus on societal problems, especially those affecting vulnerable groups, create solutions for tackling these problems, and then find ways of scaling the innovation! This intuitive sequence structures many social innovation discussions. And yet, it is incomplete and can therefore have detrimental effects for the goals associated with social innovat...

Lack of a shared vision has been identified as a major obstacle in transdisciplinary research involving both scientists and other stakeholders. Without a shared vision, the implementation of scientific findings is difficult. The diverse partners of collaborative research, however, imply a plurality in the valuation of nature and a need for delibera...

Macroeconomic measures and objectives inform and structure political perception in large systems of governance. Herman Daly and John Cobb attack the objective and measure of economic growth in For the Common Good. However, their attack is paradoxical: 1) they are in favour of strong sustainability, but construct with the ISEW an index of weak susta...

Peatlands are among the world's most carbon-dense ecosystems and hotspots of carbon storage. Although peatland drainage causes strong carbon emissions, land subsidence, fires and biodiversity loss, drainage-based agriculture and forestry on peatland is still expanding on a global scale. To maintain and restore their vital carbon sequestration and s...

Global sustainability assessments call for a rethinking of prevailing systems of production and consumption. We focus on the circular economy as an alternative system, and the role of cooperatives as transformative actors for sustainability. While cooperatives have been studied in relation to specific circularity strategies, notably recycling, we p...

The dominant conception of the circular economy presents it as a politically neutral, technology-driven process of efficiency improvements and green market expansion. However, it does not consider the social embedding of circularity and thereby risks undermining the transition out of de facto linear economies. This paper begins with a critique of t...

Both social economy and circular economy have received much attention recently. Yet, the relationship between the two remains under explored. While social economy primarily refers to economic democratization, collective enterprise, and the quest for common good, circular economy tends to focus on environmental sustainability. This article examines...

“Utopia dynamizes action,” said Mathieu R´egnier, curator of the MTL + exhibition at the Biosphere, Environment Museum in Montreal, to students of a sustainable development and management graduate course. The exhibition brought together 14 local design teams – mainly architectural firms – to present their utopias for Montreal in 2067. Projects rang...

Quebec is a pioneer in both social economy and social innovation (Wright 2010, Bouchard 2013) as well as in circular economy (Sauvé et al. 2016, Teigiero et al., 2018). In this chapter, we explore how social economy and circular economy policies accompany the transition towards a just and sustainable circular economy, identify areas of convergence,...

Les tourbières modifiées et drainées contribuent à environ 5 % des émissions mondiales de gaz à effet de serre d’origine anthropique. Ainsi, le remouillage des tourbières constitue-t-il un pari important à relever pour la protection du climat, mais aussi sur le plan de la gestion durable. La paludiculture, ou utilisation productive des tourbières h...

Sia la democrazia economica che l’economia circolare hanno ricevuto molta attenzione ultimamente (Ferreras et al. 2020; Raworth 2017). Ciononostante, il rapporto tra le due rimane poco studiato nella teoria come nella pratica. Semplificando, possiamo dire che mentre la democrazia economica riguarda soprattutto la giustizia e la partecipazione, l’ec...

There are calls for social innovation to help with the effort to halt biodiversity loss. However, research on social innovation and biodiversity is dispersed and covers a multitude of disciplines. A systematic overview of research on social innovation and biodiversity is missing and this paper contributes by focusing on social innovation to tackle...

Abstract of the teaching case: The prevailing urban water management systems treat stormwater as a nuisance to be channelled away from cities; however, cities need water to maintain a green urban environment and for local cooling, and rainwater retention helps to eliminate droughts and flooding caused by climate change. Les Ateliers Ublo supports...

Both economic democracy and circular economy have received much attention recently. However, the relation between the two remains understudied, both conceptually and empirically. While economic democracy primarily refers to justice and participation, circular economy tends to be explored with respect to environmental sustainability. This chapter ex...

In light of current unsustainability trends, achieving major sustainability goals, such as the protection of life on land and below water (SDG 14 and 15), requires transformative change. This paper focuses on transformative change of values and, for this, on the idea of a nature-respecting sufficiency. Sustainability discussions are motivated by tw...

Drainage-base agriculture and forestry are key drivers of emissions from degraded peatlands. An important challenge of climate-oriented peatland management is an improved conservation of their huge carbon stocks. Paludiculture, the productive use of wet peatlands, is a promising land use alternative that reduces greenhouse gas emissions substantial...

(For English scroll down) Sommaire exécutif: La Ville de Montréal envisage de créer des pôles de résilience, dans le cadre de son Plan climat 2020-2030 et à la mise en œuvre de sa Stratégie montréalaise pour une ville résiliente. Plusieurs villes dans le monde ont déjà mis en place des pôles de résilience afin d’outiller leurs communautés à faire...

Results from global paludiculture survey.

Global forest loss is highest in the tropical region, an area with high biological biodiversity. As some of these forests are part of indigenous forest management, it is important to pay attention to such management, its values and practices for better conservation. This paper focuses on sacred freshwater swamp forests of the Western Ghats, India,...

Wetland buffer zones (WBZs) are riparian areas that form a transition between terrestrial and aquatic environments and are well-known to remove agricultural water pollutants such as nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P). This review attempts to merge and compare data on the nutrient load, nutrient loss and nutrient removal and/or retention from multiple...

The term ‘social innovation’ has come to gather all manner of (positive) meanings from policymakers and politicians across the political spectrum. But while actors may unproblematically unite around a broadly positive perspective of social innovation as bringing about (positive) social change, we rarely see evidence of a shared vision for the kind...

Global forest loss is highest in the tropical region, an area with high biological biodiversity. As some of these forests are part of indigenous forest management, it is important to pay Forthcoming in Environmental Values. ©2020 The White Horse Press www.whpress.co.uk 2 attention to such management, its values and practices for better conservation...

Economic space for social innovation is not bounded by markets. Further to the money-based exchange relations in markets, there is self and informal provision based on social norms such as reciprocity, community, public provision of entitlements and of public goods organized via political processes, and professional provision based on expert knowle...

The basis of this chapter is a comprehensive case study on freshwater supply in European countries from the nineteenth century to the present. First, the chapter introduces the different phases of freshwater supply during that time span as well as various modes of provision (self-provision, informal provision, market provision, public provision, an...

This chapter revisits the Extended Social Grid Model based on empirical work exploring the model. It summarizes the main findings around four basic points: first, the need to move beyond economic space as markets if social innovation for the marginalized is to be analysed in its full complexity and the variety of provision appreciated beyond a redu...

This chapter provides empirical insights of agency and empowerment in social innovation across Europe. We apply portions of the theoretical framework developed in CrESSI to investigate whether social innovation is potentially able to reduce the marginalization of specific groups. We depart from the hypothesis that social innovation enhances partici...

For the analysis of social innovation and marginalization processes, the Extended Social Grid Model (ESGM) proposes a plural focus on social sources of power—cultural, economic, security-related, political, natural, and artefactual—and how these congeal and entwine in the cognitive frames, social networks, and institutions of a time and place. Draw...

This chapter explores the freedom case for a post-growth economy. Taking economist Niko Paech's vision of such an economy as a paradigmatic starting point, the chapter makes three contributions. It expands the analysis of the central distinction of a commercial and decommercialized area in such an economy introducing next to (commercial) market pro...

European policy discourse on circular economy tends to focus on innovation in relation to business and especially industry. Research suggests, however, that in order to achieve successful transitions to circular economy all social actors must be considered. Institutional pluralism and a variety of modes of provision – market, public and communal –...

Time and innovation are intrinsically related in in capitalism via the imaginative anticipation of the future. Fictional expectations, as Jens Beckert has argued, are important for understanding the dynamics of capitalism, including its colonization of alternative, creative expressions of agency. So what about the role of fictional expectation for...

Book review. Jason M. Kelly, Philip V. Scarpino, Helen Berry, James Syvitski, and Michel Meybeck, eds. Rivers of the Anthropocene

Sacred areas are the oldest form of habitat protection, and many of these areas contribute to biodiversity conservation. While sacred groves have received considerable scholarly attention, little is known about fresh water swamps in the Western Ghats, India and sacred swamps have largely been ignored. This paper provides a first overview testing th...

Economic space for social innovation is not bounded by markets. Further to the money based exchange relations in markets, there is self and informal provision based on social norms such as reciprocity, community and; public provision of entitlements and public goods organised via political processes; as well as professional provision based on exper...

The capability approach, an influential development in ethics, provides a way for the consideration of justice and democracy at the core of social innovation. It creates space for a critical reflection on and promotion of social innovation that is social both in its ends and in its means.

There have been many creative responses to modern economic, political and technological developments and their (un)intended social and ecological consequences. These responses provide the soil for the type of social innovation identified in this article: citizen innovation as niche restoration. It is about civic action that creates novelty by seeki...

The rise of social innovation expresses a discontent with innovation as we know it, and its ability to deliver just and sustainable outcomes. Yet, social innovation is also notoriously vague as a concept, thereby putting into doubt whether the concept offers any real improvements or alternatives. This paper issues an invitation to think about socia...

Table of Contents Chapter 1, Introduction: global water ethics – towards a Water Ethics Charter Rafael Ziegler and David Groenfeldt Chapter 2, The historical and intellectual context of global water ethics Susan Lea Smith Part I – Ethics and Epistemology Chapter 3, What is and to what end do we study water ethics? Lessons for the Water Ethic...

This paper demonstrates that the capabilities approach offers a number of conceptual and evaluative benefits for understanding social innovation and – in particular, its capacity to tackle marginalisation. Focusing on the substantive freedoms and achieved functionings of individuals introduces a multidimensional, plural appreciation of disadvantage...

Travellers, do you wonder about the blue line meandering across the map of the city you travel to? Do you wonder when you will see the city's river for the first time . . . and whether will you see it? Do you wonder whether you will see the city from the river? And what difference this would make? This tour guide documents a visit to the Spree by a...

Der Beitrag analysiert die ‚Jugendquote‘ als eine inkrementelle Politik-Innovation, welche die Beteiligungsmöglichkeiten junger Bürgerinnen im parlamentarischen System durch eine Quote zu verbessern versucht. Die Analyse, die sich begrifflich auf den Fähigkeiten-Ansatz und empirisch auf die Erfahrung mit Jugendparlamenten stützt, legt nahe, dass ei...

Over the last decade, climate neutrality has emerged as an empowering, new concept—and it has given rise to concerns that it may be conducive to greenwashing and a disregard for justice and sustainability. Are these concerns justified? This paper argues that there is a qualified case for climate neutrality as part of an integrated approach to clima...

This paper explores the planetary boundary framework (PB-F) from a biocentric perspective. With a focus on the planetary boundary for freshwater, we show that a biocentric perspective implies a shift from a safe space for humanity to an environmental ceiling that also respects the water needs of other living beings. A safe, just and sufficient spac...

Wasser ist für Menschen Lebensmittel und grundlegende Metapher. Beispielsweise findet sich in der europäischen Philosophietradition die dem Vorsokratiker Thales von Milet zugeschriebene These, dass Wasser das Prinzip oder der Ursprung aller Dinge sei, sowie die meist Heraklit zugeschriebene ›Flusslehre‹ panta rhei (alles fließt). In der chinesische...

The final version of this paper has been published as "social innovation as a collaborative concept", in Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 1–18. doi:10.1080/13511610.2017.1348935.

Transdisciplinary sustainability science (TSS) is a prominent way of scientifically contributing to the solution of sustainability problems. Little is known, however, about the practice of scientists in TSS, especially those early in their career. Our objectives were to identify these practices and to outline the needs and challenges for early care...

Innovation plays an ambivalent yet important role in modern societies. A general conception of innovation, based on research in innovation studies from economics and sociology, specifies this role not just as a matter of entrepreneurs in pursuit of private gain in markets, but rather in terms of a network of actors who carry out a new idea. Via a c...

Innovation plays an ambivalent yet important role in modern society. A general conception of innovation, based on research in innovation studies from economics and sociology, specifies this role not just as a matter of entrepreneurs in pursuit of private gain in markets, but rather in terms of a network of actors who carry out a new idea. Via a cri...

If only a minority in national parliaments, provincial parliaments and town hall assemblies is below 30 years of age, do we have to worry about justice between generations and the long term sustainability of the political system? Do we need an instrument such as the youth quota to improve the long-term justice of the parliamentary system? This chap...

The CRESSI project explores the economic underpinnings of social innovation with a particular focus on how policy and practice can enhance the lives of the most marginalized and disempowered citizens in society.

Social agreements, roughly put, are a focused and actual variant of social contracts. They are focused on the agreement of parties to co-operate and they pertain to basic aspects of living and living together; however, not comprehensively but focused on a specific theme or themes such as sanitation, water supply or energy provisions. Unlike hypothe...

The European Rivers Network (ERN) calls for the ‘reconci liation of citizens with their rivers and lakes’ as a necessary step for freshwater protection and the restora-tion of rivers. ERN co-ordinates annual ri ver bathing days including collective river jumps, when across Europe, upstream an d downstream, citize ns simultaneously jump into rivers...

Over the last decade, climate neutrality has emerged as an empowering, new concept—and it has given rise to concerns that it may be conducive to greenwashing and a disregard for justice and sustainability. Are these concerns justified? This paper argues that there is a qualified case for climate neutrality as part of an integrated approach to clima...

For individuals at paper price on Google ebooks and ebooks.com Other eBook partners. Cover Description There are few sectors where ‘getting things done sustainably’ is as important as it is for the water sector. From drinking water and sanitation to water use in agriculture, industry, and ecosystems, Rafael Ziegler and his co-authors investigate...