1255 | 839 | A new public? Grounding a critical geographic approach to the role of new philantropy in social innovation processes

This paper builds a theoretical and methodological framework to examine the role of new philanthropy in the institutionalization of social innovation practices as a response to the global challenges of the 21st century. The main argument is that, engaging with such topic through a critical geographic perspective, can help us to understand how power operates across different spatial and decision-making scales, and the possibilities left to civil society for building an alternative model of regulation to the neoliberal order. The first half of the paper reviews how, the theoretical framework of “advanced marginality” can be an entry point to understand the institutionalization of social innovation. Shifting the focus away from the punitive strategies of penalization of poverty, this approach can be adopted to understand how the governance and leadership expectations resulting from the production and diffusion of noxious representations of stigmatized spaces, might be exploited to gain public consensus and engagement of civil society in neoliberal strategies of territorial fixation. The second half of the paper proposes to apply a Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approach to understand how new philanthropies capture the effects of these transformations for political gain. Placing semiosis within the analysis of critical geography, this evolutionary and institutionalized approach can help to understand how these actors establish themselves as leading agents in the definition of local political agendas that incorporate – and are incorporated by – distant governmental agencies.

Francesco Puletti
DIST – Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning – Polytechnic of Turin and University of Turin

ID Abstract: 839