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There is a growing body of literature on responsible innovation (RI). RI is prominent in debates and policies regarding the governance of research and innovation, particularly in the EU and USA. The paper brings together sociologically-informed institutional analysis and critical discourse analysis into a discourse-institutional perspective, which is applied to review the emergence of and scholarly contributions to literature on RI. It generates insights into the role of language use in the institutionalisation of RI from detailed analysis of a foundational text. The paper identifies evidence for the institutionalisation of RI, how this has been accomplished and by whom. The paper considers opportunities for and limitations of RI research and policy in connection with its potential to foster effective anticipatory governance of science and innovation while facilitating inclusive deliberation in society. The conclusion suggests that RI is a developing area of research and practice in which there are dominant perspectives, practices and actors, which combine to inhibit the building of a truly responsive, inclusive and reflexive approach to governing innovation.

The social solidarity economy is an approach to the production and consumption of goods, services and knowledge that promises to address contemporary economic, social and environmental crises more effectively than business as usual. The paper employs the concept of commons ecologies to examine the practices, relationships and interactions among actors and organisations in the social solidarity economy, as well as between them and the mainstream economy, which shape the field and its degree of autonomy in relation to capitalism, through a process defined as boundary commoning. Such process shapes both local and regional commons ecologies, as well as the participation of local and regional actors in wider networks at national, international and global levels. The paper takes a case study‐based approach to identify practices, relationships and interactions of commons ecologies in relation to selected community‐led initiatives in the UK, Portugal, Brazil and Senegal. Each case study illuminates different qualities of local/regional commons ecologies and their forms of engagement with wider networks. Further, the paper shows that these cases demonstrate how the social solidarity economy may facilitate delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals in a distinctive way. In each case, SSE acts as a vehicle for expressing participants' values and principles consistent with those underlying the SDGs. Local implementation of SDGs is thus an in‐built feature of these commons ecologies. The participation of community‐led initiatives in international and global networks offers opportunities to learn from local level experiences and successes, potentially strengthening SDG implementation more generally.

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Reducing residential energy use and related CO2 emissions across society requires approaches that understand energy demand as dependent on the performance of a range of interconnected social practices, which includes aspects of timing, location and material contexts. However, current energy policy and change initiatives often rely on a somewhat narrow combination of rational consumer choice models, efficiency measures and information-based behavioral change theory, thus falling short on anticipated reductions (EEA, 2013). Insights from the ENERGISE project highlight the merits of a practice-theoretical approach to social scientific energy research that explicitly recognizes complex interactions in the social organization of everyday life. The paper demonstrates how such an approach provides knowledge on variations in energy use across households, social groups and societies and how these are (not) acknowledged in the problem framings of dominant energy policies and change initiatives. Reflecting on experiences made during a large-scale comparative analysis of sustainable energy consumption change initiatives in 30 European countries, this paper presents a new and innovative methodology for investigating the dynamics of change initiatives that target energy use within households and communities. It concludes with some critical reflections on the methodology presented.