Clark University Geography Professor Yuko Aoyama’s new book, “The Rise of the Hybrid Domain: Collaborative Governance for Social Innovation,” explores a new model of social innovation through which corporations, states, and civil society organizations develop common social agendas despite differences in their primary objectives.

Aoyama wrote the book in collaboration with Professor Balaji Parthasarathy of the International Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore, India. Through examining cases of state-market cooperation in education, energy, health, and finance in India and elsewhere, the researchers demonstrate how corporations, social entrepreneurs, and social finance can override organizational borders to devise local solutions to social problems. Aoyama and Parthasarathy conceptualize this collaboration as the hybrid domain, an emerging institutional form of social innovation that overlaps public and private interests.

“Social impacts cannot be achieved exclusively by state actions nor corporate actions. We saw so many cases of cross-sector collaborations, but academic debates still largely revolve around states vs. markets,” Aoyama said. “We need to recognize a domain where the public and the private domain overlaps to better reflect the empirical reality of various forms of collaborations.”

Karen Chapple, professor at University of California at Berkeley and founder of the Center for Community Innovation, notes that in “challenging ideological conceptions of the state-market dichotomy, the authors re-conceptualize governance as collective action.” Their book, she adds, “chronicles the most creative social problem-solving occurring today, and is a must read for social innovators around the globe.”

A professor in Clark’s Graduate School of Geography, Aoyama received a B.A. from International Christian University, Tokyo, an M.A from University of California at Los Angeles and a Ph. D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She arrived at Clark University in 2000, teaching classes on economic geography, industrial geography, internet geography, and globalization. Her research interest lies in developing geographic understandings of global capitalism from institutional and comparative perspectives. Previously, Aoyama was awarded an Academic Writing Residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and an Abe Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council.

“The Rise of the Hybrid Domain” emerged from Aoyama and Parthasarathy’s collaborative research funded by the National Science Foundation; it included field research in India and elsewhere between 2011 and 2015.