Start date: 30.11.2023 | End date: 29.11.25

Consult the website of the project HERE

Research units:

• University of Trento, Prof. Francesca Forno (PI)
• University of Padua, Prof. Paolo Graziano

The need to develop sustainable forms of food production, distribution and consumption is at the core of the ecological transition.

Over recent years, the international community has gradually acknowledged that the way food systems are evolving needs to be coupled with sustainability. One major example is the contribution of the current food system to climate change: about 21–37% of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are attributable to the food system (IPCC Special Report Climate Change and Land, 2019).

The societal and human impacts are similarly severe: 2 billion people suffer from obesity and related diseases, while 836 million people are still undernourished, although annually one-third of the food produced – about 1.3 billion tonnes per year – is wasted (Gustavsson, Cederberg, Sonesson, Van Otterdijk, and Meybeck, 2011). These figures provide an overview of the unsustainable status of the current food system, strongly related to the high instability and uncertainty of food security worldwide (Marsden and Morley, 2014). The problems linked to the current food provision is also suggested by the weaknesses of this system in times of crisis: for example, the effects of Covid‐19 first and of the conflict in Ukraine thereafter have been seismic from the perspective of food systems worldwide. Furthermore, the picture gets even more worrisome considering that the UN projections claim that by 2050 66% of the world population will live in urban areas (UN, 2014). This dramatically increases the importance of the role played by cities, in both global North and South, in tackling climate change and fostering adaptation measures for food security.

As increasingly suggested and emphasized, strengthening local systems of food, and supporting a sustainable circular economy might be the only way to try to address the various challenges presented by food system failures (SAPEA, 2020). It is within this effort that an increasing number of cities around the world have begun to implement new Urban Food Strategies (UFS). As claimed by Moragues-Faus et al. (2013: 6) UFS is “a process consisting of how a city envisions a change in its food system, and how it strives towards this change”.

Against this background, the research project (Making Food Democracy) has three interconnected aims:

1. to advance the theoretical and conceptual knowledge useful for understanding the linkage between sustainable food strategies and local democracy (see WP2)

2. to empirically investigate (i.e., both describe and explain) ongoing efforts to design integrated and place-based modes of sustainable food governance in Europe (see WP3 and WP4);

3. to transfer, adopting a living lab methodology, the knowledge learned at the European level to two Italian cities (Trento and Padua) which have started to design, in collaboration with the local Universities, their own local sustainable food policy (see WP5).

Il presente progetto è finanziato dall’Unione europea – Next Generation EU, nell’ambito del bando PRIN 2022 PNRR, progetto “MAKING FOOD DEMOCRACY. Investigating and experimenting with how food policies work” (P2022C3PMT) – CUP E53D23021270001.