Contro l’innovazione sociale

This article offers a critical analysis of contemporary debates on social innovation, highlighting the conceptual ambiguity and rhetorical inflation that characterise its current usage. Despite its widespread adoption as a solution to unmet social needs, the notion of social innovation often lacks epistemological clarity and is frequently mobilised to align with neoliberal logics of welfare retrenchment, marketisation, and the depoliticisation of structural inequalities. The article contrasts dominant managerial and entrepreneurial approaches with perspectives that situate social innovation within broader processes of collective action and socio-ecological transformation. Four domains –state retrenchment, the entanglement with capitalist economic structures, cultural cooptation, and gentrification – are identified as areas in which social innovation may generate ambivalent or adverse effects. The analysis also challenges common colonial myths that portray social innovation as inherently positive or progressive. The article ultimately calls for a situated and critically informed epistemology capable of recognising the political, relational, and context-dependent nature of practices labelled as social innovation.