Poisedness for social innovation: The genesis and propagation of community- based palliative care in Kerala (India)

Summary

This paper investigates what makes a context poised for social innovation, by examining how Kerala fostered a community-based end-of-life care project where similar attempts failed across the rest of India. The paper finds that the societal and political context of Kerala enabled the project’s genesis through its pervasive history and culture of horizontal associationism, participative democracy, and community organizations, then enabled the project’s propagation through its state government’s political capacity, societal prevalence of health-seeking behaviors, and availability of relevant infrastructure and competences to be leveraged. These findings illustrate the cycle of social entrepreneurship: existing civic institutions are neither untouched nor merely used by entrepreneurs, but rather the creation of one wave of entrepreneurs that enables the next, reproduced in new times and places through the projects they organize.