Empowering Baltic Sea Region public authorities to integrate social innovation for sustainable development across departments
The Baltic Sea Region faces major social, ecological, and economic challenges. Although public authorities increasingly recognise the need for sustainable development, social innovation* (SI)—a potent instrument for achieving this goal—remains underused.
Projects across the Baltic Sea Region have delivered strong achievements, including tested social innovation ecosystem models, regional pilots, capacity development, and toolboxes for a just green transition. Yet their results remain scattered, and public actors struggle to apply them, lacking step-by-step guidance and implementation capacity.
This project equips public authorities with the tools, skills and policy insight they need to apply social innovation more effectively in their daily work:
- It consolidates and structures the knowledge produced in past social innovation projects and makes it usable through the AI-supported Social Innovation Navigator.
- It builds the capacity of local and regional authorities through a Transnational Social Innovation Learning Partnership.
- It strengthens the policy environment needed for long-term uptake through multi-level strategy labs and dialogue with the EUSBSR and other EU macroregional strategies.
By addressing the concrete needs of target groups—access to usable knowledge, stronger internal capacities, and clearer policy frameworks—the project enables authorities to apply and scale socially innovative approaches. This directly tackles the identified challenge of fragmented support systems and unlocks SI’s potential as a driver for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the BSR.
Nordregio will contribute solutions and outputs from several projects to the development of a Social Innovation Navigator, targeting local authorities in the Baltic Sea Region. Nordregio will also have a key role in communicating to stakeholders about the results of the project.
* Social innovation is defined as innovation that is social in both means and ends. Social innovation methods apply across all dimensions of sustainability, helping solve societal challenges while supporting the Agenda 2030.
