We therefore contribute to a relatively young branch of literature that has taken up the challenge of connecting the insights from the multilevel perspective with the spread of social innovations.
We also demonstrate how the multilevel perspective from the transition literature and the concepts of opportunity context and situated agency from the literature on institutional entrepreneurship can be fruitfully merged with the social-ecological transformations literature, thereby moving towards a more comprehensive conceptual framework for analysing sustainability transformations.
We describe the unintended consequences of this deployment through a multilevel perspective of the head organisation and the smaller 195 local institutions that support it.
There is a need of a multilevel perspective (e.g., the individuals, the social environment, the health system), together with the examination of the links between the different levels and dimensions of the problem.
The multilevel perspective (MLP) was used to analyse the state of system innovation in relation to the uptake and integration of decentralised CHP technology.
It therefore seems natural to consider both concepts in parallel and to analyze to what extent the lessons from the multilevel perspective can be applied to social innovations and to learn to better understand the complexity of the diffusion of social innovations.
On the basis of these criteria, we selected five leading edge social innovation initiatives in the German Energiewende and examined in how far these could be analyzed using the multilevel perspective heuristics.2 To do so, the empirical examples were examined in a desk research along a heuristic of the following questions: What can be considered the 'regime' in the example?
This social innovation can therefore definitely be categorized as a leading edge innovation; nevertheless, the applicability of the multilevel perspective to analyze its diffusion should be questioned.
On the one hand, the multilevel perspective (MLP) of transitions has become popular to analyze, explain, and govern transitions from one sociotechnical system to the next.
Next, we analyse the systemic status quo regarding the uptake and integration of decentralised CHP into the energy system of the Ruhr Valley by using the multilevel perspective (MLP) framework for transitional change [11,12].
