Social innovation related to ecological crises: A systematic literature review and a research agenda for strong sustainability

New technologies, market-based solutions, and regulation have proven inadequate in remedying today's human caused ecological crises. This suggests that detrimental social practices need to be fundamentally changed. While social innovation is one possible approach for such change, a comprehensive picture of research on social innovation in relation to ecological challenges is missing. Therefore, with an emphasis on so-called strong sustainability, this article's purpose was to investigate social innovation's potential in relation to ecological crises, to identify important gaps, and advance research implications. A systematic literature review of social innovation research that address environmental issues was carried out, and the resulting literature was analyzed according to sustainability and five dimensions of social innovation. To reap more of social innovation's potential in our time of ecological crises, we suggest a move in social innovation research towards strong sustainability and propose such research avenues within each of the five dimensions of social innovation: conceptualization, environmental needs and challenges, key resources, capabilities, and constraints, types of governance, networks and actors, and, finally, process dynamics for strongly sustainable social innovation. •We conducted a systematic literature review.•We investigated research that relates social innovation to ecological crises.•We stressed the need for strong sustainability.•We analyzed how social innovation is characterized in five dimensions.•We provided a future research agenda of social innovation for ecological crises.