Definition
Grassroots innovation happens when creative and collaborative people pursue autonomous local development. A widely used definition is “networks of activists and organizations generating novel bottom-up solutions for sustainable development; solutions that respond to the local situation and the interests and values of the communities involved”. This takes varied technological, social, and organizational forms in diverse community contexts across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania.
History
Grassroots innovation is rooted in both environmentalism in the Global North and development alternatives in the Global South.
Think global, act local emerged as a slogan in the 1970s among environmentalists, mostly in the Global North. It helped animate pioneering activities in community energy, agroecology, ecohousing, repair and recycling, and more. Grassroots innovation emphasizes two subsequent aspects of this activity: first, it recognizes the importance of local experimentation, knowledge-production, and skills provision in building more sustainable societies (see Living Labs); and second, it counters the more recent monopolization of innovation narratives and resources by technocratic approaches to business greening (see Greenwashing). Grassroots innovation stands for local participation and democratic control in sustainable transformations.
The concept has also been vital in long-standing struggles for autonomous alternatives to international development blueprints imposed upon the Global South. Across a wide diversity of so-called developing country contexts, local communities have for generations created appropriate technologies, informal innovations, traditional remedies, and practices. They have culturally rooted community inventiveness in their struggle to resist top-down, technocratic development models – including resisting those models on environmental grounds. In India since the 1980s, for example, the Honey Bee Network has promoted “grassroots innovation” explicitly to heighten awareness and raise support for bottom-up sustainable developments (see Box 63.1). The Network’s success has led to national policies increasingly prioritizing grassroots innovation. Whenever policymakers in other countries and multilateral development agencies face social pressure to make their programs more “inclusive”, they may become more open to supporting grassroots innovations. However, activists and communities often remain cautious and conflicted about such top-down attention, especially when it misinterprets or undermines the autonomous goals of grassroots creativity.
Different Perspectives
Grassroots innovation contrasts with those business and policy approaches that monopolize ideas about what counts as innovation in society. Innovation policy typically deals with systems of researchers, firms, investors, and entrepreneurs dedicated to commercializing novel products, processes, and services. Sustainable innovation as conventionally promoted by policymakers means working within these systems to develop ecoefficient businesses – without disrupting capitalism’s underlying need for increased productivity, managerial control, and competitive accumulation of resources.
Meanwhile, grassroots innovation happens amidst community-based activities. While economic viability is important, its basis is rooted in moral, social, and cultural values operating outside the logic of commodification. Table 63.1 below elaborates on these perspectives (see also Prosumerism, Alternative Consumer Cooperatives, Convivial Technology).
Application
While the sheer diversity of grassroots innovation always requires careful contextualization, it holds in common an emphasis in community well-being, ecological sustainability, and collaborative endeavor. It emerges in areas such as agroecology, community energy, hackerspaces, urban food systems, water and sanitation systems, repair cafés, ecohousing, citizen science, or community media (e.g., radio and internet). These initiatives often blend advanced technologies, traditional techniques, and social innovations, prioritizing solutions that align with local needs and empower sustainability transformation in ways that enhance community autonomy.
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Intermediary organizations and supportive transnational networks help circulate grassroots innovations by sharing knowledge, experience, resources, and advocacy, helping innovations adapt and be embedded in new contexts. Wider social movements can also be of indirect support whenever their goals imply greater attention and support for grassroots innovation. Right to Repair movements in North America and Europe, for example, demand changes that make it easier for consumers to get their products repaired. Some manufacturers are exploring the commercial possibilities in this, but in potentially disempowering ways through extended product-service relationships globally (see Product-Service Systems). In response, some in the repair movement press for more radical transformation by aligning with grassroots innovations like repair cafés and community-based remanufacturing (e.g., in maker spaces) that are emblematic of a deeper kind of social repair anticipated in commons-based and postgrowth economies (see Degrowth).
Grassroots innovations have diverse material and immaterial impacts over time. Open-source digital technologies in citizen science, for example, enable participants to monitor their environment, build local knowledge, and strengthen community ties. These initiatives foster new community and economic arrangements, social agency, and collaborative skills, and cultivate new participant identities. Indeed, the development of participatory methodologies, alongside organizational skills and collaboration techniques, are important grassroots achievements in themselves. Grassroots innovations embody social values and narratives often ignored by mainstream innovation, which reframe global environmental issues and provide new meanings through local actions. They can thereby offer diverse prototypes for more inclusive and sustainable futures.
Governments and businesses occasionally face pressure to adopt more inclusive and responsible innovation practices, drawing policy attention to grassroots initiatives. The Honey Bee Network demonstrates how policies can support grassroots innovators in becoming more entrepreneurial and scaling up through funding, prototyping facilities, training, incubators, and partnerships (see Box 63.1).
Box 63.1 Grassroots innovation policies in India – The Honey Bee Network
Post-colonial India’s focus on industrialization and agricultural modernization often marginalized rural populations. Concerned about a turn away from alternative development models, such as those proposed by Gandhi during the struggle for independence, a movement materialized committed to drawing attention to the inventiveness of informal economic activities in India. As such, the Honey Bee Network, founded by Anil Gupta in 1988, emerged to document and promote grassroots innovations. It acknowledges the inventiveness of individuals and promotes economic support and reward through commercialization and knowledge sharing. Among its activities are regular walks of discovery through India’s diverse rural communities, known as Shodh Yatras (now on their 48th edition).
In the 1990s, the Honey Bee Network influenced regional and national policies to support grassroots innovation, earning recognition from India’s then-Prime Minister. This led to the creation of the National Innovation Foundation (2000), which continues to document inventions, secure intellectual property, offer prototyping facilities, and connect innovators with industry and financial partners. Over 300,000 innovations have been recorded, resulting in 416 patents and enterprises producing off-grid refrigeration, low-cost farming tools, small-scale fabrication technologies, and natural health remedies.
However, policy often overlooks the systems-changing potential of grassroots innovation, instead channeling promising ideas into conventional market-based frameworks for commercialization and scaling. While this can benefit social entrepreneurs, it risks sidelining deeper transformative possibilities (see Box 63.2). These arrangements rarely reinvest in the grassroots conditions and community labor that enabled the original innovation. Policy often overlooks the deeper aspirations of grassroots innovators, who commit to local action within ecological limits and social justice which can confound policy assumptions about scaling-up and requirements for economic growth. This mismatch creates mutual disappointment, as institutions struggle to support the open-ended, place-based autonomy essential for grassroots innovation to drive transformative sustainability.
Box 63.2 Grassroots innovation policies in Brazil – The Social Technologies Network
Launched in 2004 under Lula’s first government, Brazil’s Social Technologies Network aimed to empower communities through participatory social technologies that gave them greater capacity for subsequent autonomous development. Projects like self-constructed rainwater harvesting systems improved water access while fostering self-organizing capabilities for future community development and resource advocacy. Nationally, the initiative sought to reshape technology policy around these principles.
The Social Technologies Network promoted social technologies through events, awards, and collaborations with over 900 grassroots organizations, including NGOs, universities, government agencies, and financial organizations. Supported by R$400 million from the national government and corporate foundations like Banco do Brasil, the Network aimed to empower communities. However, tensions arose as some members favored market-based approaches, promoting pro-poor technologies that could diffuse through markets or be distributed through social programs over its philosophy of liberatory social technologies. These disagreements led to the Network’s disbandment in 2012, with its initiatives continuing independently through affiliated organizations.
Radical grassroots innovation calls for autonomous, sustainable transformation. For example, UK defense sector workers in the 1970s prototyped socially useful products like wind turbines and electric vehicles. They were not only demonstrating how jobs could be saved through peaceful redeployment of skills and machinery, but they were also confronting the political establishment with calls for transforming economic institutions based on democratic socialism. Similarly, grassroots innovators in Mexico use community radios, mobile telephony, and appropriate technologies to provide practical benefits while asserting territorial and cultural autonomy. They see in these convivial technologies a material expression of territorial and cultural autonomy that resists top-down ideas about innovation and the aims of development programs.
Systems perspectives in sustainable development need to be appreciative of the contradictions, tensions, and synergies highlighted here in relations between the different scales and forms of grassroots innovation, their contexts of operation, and the design of institutional supports. More pluralistic systems perspectives can help explain why grassroots innovation develops and struggles in niches globally and how supportive changes in context can help it to circulate and thrive more widely. Ultimately, grassroots innovation is about acting creatively in communities locally while transforming institutions globally.
Further Reading
Avelino, F., Dumitru, A., Cipolla, C., Kunze, I., & Wittmayer, J. (2020). Translocal empowerment in transformative social innovation networks. European Planning Studies, 28(5), 955–977. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2019.1578339.
Kumar, H., & Sharma, G. (2024). Grassroots innovation: Discourse, policy and practice in the global south. Abingdon: Routledge.
Roysen, R., Bruehwiler, N., Kos, L., Boyer, R., & Koehrsen, J. (2024). Rethinking the diffusion of grassroots innovations: An embedding framework. Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 200, 123156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2023.123156.
Seyfang, G., & Smith, A. (2007). Grassroots innovations for sustainable development: Towards a new research and policy agenda. Environmental Politics, 16(4), 584–603. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010701419121.
Smith, A., Fressoli, M., Abrol, D., Arond, E., & Ely, A. (2017). Grassroots innovation movements. London: Routledge.