* A unique account of a high-profile transdisciplinary research project, bringing together the STEPS consortium and building on earlier work in the 'Pathways to Sustainability' series * Distinct contributions from research teams working across six diverse international contexts * A novel comparative analysis of the role of social science and transdisciplinary research in sustainability transformations * Mapping out prospects for future research and impact agendas associated with global sustainability challenges and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Innovation is increasingly invoked by policy elites and business leaders as vital for tackling global challenges like sustainable development. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that networks of community groups, activists, and researchers have been innovating grassroots solutions for social justice and environmental sustainability for decades. Unencumbered by disciplinary boundaries, policy silos, or institutional logics, these 'grassroots innovation movements' identify issues and questions neglected by formal science, technology and innovation organizations. Grassroots solutions arise in unconventional settings through unusual combinations of people, ideas and tools. This book examines six diverse grassroots innovation movements in India, South America and Europe, situating them in their particular dynamic historical contexts. Analysis explains why each movement frames innovation and development differently, resulting in a variety of strategies. The book explores the spaces where each of these movements have grown, or attempted to do so. It critically examines the pathways they have developed for grassroots innovation and the challenges and limitations confronting their approaches. With mounting pressure for social justice in an increasingly unequal world, policy makers are exploring how to foster more inclusive innovation. In this context grassroots experiences take on added significance. This book provides timely and relevant ideas, analysis and recommendations for activists, policy-makers, students and scholars interested in encounters between innovation, development and social movements.

Examining the regulation of technologies, this book explores how the drive to harmonize regulatory policies across the world is at odds with the increasingly diverse local settings in which they are implemented. The authors use a 'framings' approach that starts with the concerns and experiences of technology users and works 'upwards' in order to examine how best to improve regulation. The book centres around two in-depth case study topics: regulation of transgenic cotton seed and regulation of antibiotics, compared across situations in China and Argentina. The authors examine how high-level initiatives in regulatory harmonization and regulatory capacity building compare with national policies, day-to-day enforcement realities on the ground, and with the way poorer users experience these technologies. Through these studies the authors offer ways to rethink regulation in order to realign the power and politics at play and create more effective regulation for technology users around the world. Published in association with the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

* A unique account of a high-profile transdisciplinary research project, bringing together the STEPS consortium and building on earlier work in the 'Pathways to Sustainability' series * Distinct contributions from research teams working across six diverse international contexts * A novel comparative analysis of the role of social science and transdisciplinary research in sustainability transformations * Mapping out prospects for future research and impact agendas associated with global sustainability challenges and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Innovation is increasingly invoked by policy elites and business leaders as vital for tackling global challenges like sustainable development. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that networks of community groups, activists, and researchers have been innovating grassroots solutions for social justice and environmental sustainability for decades. Unencumbered by disciplinary boundaries, policy silos, or institutional logics, these 'grassroots innovation movements' identify issues and questions neglected by formal science, technology and innovation organizations. Grassroots solutions arise in unconventional settings through unusual combinations of people, ideas and tools. This book examines six diverse grassroots innovation movements in India, South America and Europe, situating them in their particular dynamic historical contexts. Analysis explains why each movement frames innovation and development differently, resulting in a variety of strategies. The book explores the spaces where each of these movements have grown, or attempted to do so. It critically examines the pathways they have developed for grassroots innovation and the challenges and limitations confronting their approaches. With mounting pressure for social justice in an increasingly unequal world, policy makers are exploring how to foster more inclusive innovation. In this context grassroots experiences take on added significance. This book provides timely and relevant ideas, analysis and recommendations for activists, policy-makers, students and scholars interested in encounters between innovation, development and social movements.