Digital Social Innovation and Sustainability: Theory, Practice, and Debate

Abstract

Digital social innovation (DSI), the use of digital technologies by citizens, civil society organizations, social enterprises, and public institutions to develop novel solutions to social and environmental problems, has evolved over the past decade and a half as a distinct field of research and practice at the intersection of technology studies, innovation studies, and sustainability science. Current study explores the interdisciplinary literature on DSI and its relationship to sustainability, in its triple-bottom-line sense of environmental, social, and economic dimensions. It traces the conceptual roots of DSI in the broader social innovation literature and in information-systems research on digital innovation, reviews the major theoretical frameworks, including a nascent multidimensional framework spanning digital technology, innovation process, and sustainability focus to connect digital innovation to sustainable development, and examines empirical evidence on how digitally enabled initiatives, from open data commons and citizen science to platform cooperatives, civic technology, telemedicine, and precision agriculture, contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The research engages critically with the limits of DSI's contribution, including the digital divide, the environmental footprint of digital infrastructure itself, the phenomenon of data colonialism, and the tendency toward technological solutionism, before setting out a twelve-pathway research agenda and highlights practical implications for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers. DSI offers a genuine, if bounded and unevenly distributed, set of tools for advancing sustainability, and its future contribution depends less on the sophistication of the technology involved than on the governance arrangements, funding ecosystems, and power relations within which that technology is embedded.