About the Contributors

Editors' Biographies

Gianluca Brunori studied Agricultural Science at the University of Pisa. Recruited as research officer in 1986, in 1999 he became Associate Professor at the University of Trieste. He is Full Professor of Food Policy, Bioeconomy and Wine Marketing at the Department of Agriculture, Food and Environment of the University of Pisa. He has 30 years of experience in Agricultural Economics, Rural Sociology and Food Policy, participating as Principal Investigator to several European Projects, in two of them (TRUC and GLAMUR) as scientific coordinator. He has been President of the Research Committee ‘Sociology of Agriculture and Food’ of the International Sociology Association, vice-president of the European Society of Rural Sociology, Chief Editor of the journal Rivista di Economia Agraria and he is editor in chief of the journal Agriculture and Food Economics. He is the chair of the experts' group of the fifth Foresight Exercise for the EU's Standing Committee on Agricultural Research (SCAR).

Stefano Grando holds a degree in Economics at ‘La Sapienza’ University of Rome, an MSc in European Regional Development at Cardiff University and a PhD in Agrarian Economics at the University of Basilicata. He has worked in several EU-funded projects with the Universities of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, ‘Federico II’ of Naples and with the University of Pisa. He also worked in the field of monitoring and evaluation of EU-funded regional programmes. Currently he works for the Italian Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies in the agriculture and bioeconomy policy coordination area, and he is research fellow at the University of Pisa. On behalf of the Mipaaft he is deputy delegate to the Standing Committee on Agricultural Research (SCAR). He has published articles in peer-reviewed journals, and he is co-author of two books. His research fields include rural development, rural sociology, food studies, agricultural and bioeconomy policy.

Contributors' Biographies

Tessa Avermaete obtained a PhD in Applied Biological Sciences at the University of Ghent. She is currently project manager at the Sustainable Food Economies Research Group (SFERE) of Leuven University. She manages interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary consortia working in the domain of food security, sustainable food systems, agriculture and sustainable diets, focussing on the European context. Working in an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary context raises the need for good communication. Tessa Avermaete attempts to bridge communication gaps between disciplines and between researchers and practitioners in the domain of food and farming, emphasizing thereby the necessity to take evidence-based research as the key point of departure to enrich the debate. She is a member of diverse working groups at the national, regional and local levels, contributing to an evidence-based transition of the food system and empowerment of all the actors in the system.

Fabio Bartolini is Associate Professor in Agricultural Economics at the University of Pisa. He holds a PhD in Agricultural economics at the University of Bologna. His main research topic focusses on the economic, social and environmental impacts of agricultural and rural policies. Other research interests are in agricultural structural changes, global and local supply chains, the market of productive factors, and bioeconomy.

Isabelle Bonjean holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Namur, Belgium, where she specialized in quantitative analysis to inform evidence-based policy, focussing at the time on developing countries. She then joined the division of BioEconomics at KU Leuven, to further combine deep qualitative and quantitative studies to investigate market imperfections in European agri-food supply chains. There she eventually specialized in behavioural insights and developed several experiments to unravel farmers' and consumers' decision-making. All in all, she has worked on various topics related to innovation and levers for changes toward sustainable production and consumption, combining qualitative, quantitative and experimental approaches, to best fit the research needs. Her appetite for understanding individual decision-making and the resulting relevant policy is unlimited so that she could work on various issues in the future, when deemed relevant.

Gianluca Brunori studied Agricultural Science at the University of Pisa. Recruited as research officer in 1986, in 1999 he became Associate Professor at the University of Trieste. He is Full Professor of Food Policy, Bioeconomy and Wine Marketing at the Department of Agriculture, Food and Environment of the University of Pisa. He has 30 years of experience in Agricultural Economics, Rural Sociology and Food Policy, participating as Principal Investigator to several European Projects, in two of them (TRUC and GLAMUR) as scientific coordinator. He has been President of the Research Committee ‘Sociology of Agriculture and Food’ of the International Sociology Association, vice-president of the European Society of Rural Sociology, Chief Editor of the journal Rivista di Economia Agraria and he is editor in chief of the journal Agriculture and Food Economics. He is the chair of the experts group of the fifth Foresight Exercise for the EU's Standing Committee on Agricultural Research (SCAR).

Natalia Brzezina holds an MSc in Agriculture and Commodity Sciences from Warsaw University of Life Sciences (Poland) and an MSc in Food Chain Systems from Cranfield University (UK). As PhD student at KU Leuven in the Division of Bioeconomics, she conducted research within the EU FP7 project TRANSMANGO (Assessment of the impact of global drivers of change on Europe's food and nutrition security). In addition to her academic background, she gathered professional experience as a trainee inter alia in plant breeding company Hodowla Roślin Strzelce Sp. z o.o. (Strzelce, Poland), in beverage processing plant Coca-Cola Enterprises Ltd. (Milton Keynes, UK) and at European Commission (Brussels, Belgium).

Francesca Galli is a researcher at the Department of Agriculture Food and Environment, University of Pisa (Italy), where she teaches a master course on ‘Food Policies’. She holds a PhD in ‘Economics and Territory’ (at the University of Tuscia, Viterbo, in 2011) focusing on ‘Multi-criteria’ assessment of Protected Designations of Origin and Geographical Indications. Since 2011, She continued as a post doc researcher at the University of Pisa, working on international and national research projects where she had the opportunity to explore diverse themes, benefiting from inter-disciplinary perspectives, working in connection with relevant societal and policy actors and networks. This allowed her to expand the view on the multidimensionality of agriculture and food and the socioeconomic and political challenges that characterize contemporary agri-food systems. Her key research interests are: functioning and vulnerabilities of food systems and related policies analysis; food and nutrition security, socioeconomic and environmental outcomes; assessment of the sustainability performance of food value chains; the role of small farms and their contribution to territorial food system outcomes; the connections between rural and urban areas and related governance arrangements.

Stefano Grando holds a degree in Economics at ‘La Sapienza’ University of Rome, an MSc in European Regional Development at the Cardiff University and a PhD in Agrarian Economics at the University of Basilicata. He has worked in several EU-funded projects with the Universities of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, ‘Federico II’ of Naples and with the University of Pisa. He also worked in the field of monitoring and evaluation of EU-funded regional programmes. Currently he works for the Italian Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies in the agriculture and bioeconomy policy coordination area, and he is research fellow at the University of Pisa. On behalf of the Mipaaft he is deputy delegate to the Standing Committee on Agricultural Research (SCAR). He has published articles in peer-reviewed journals, and he is co-author of two books. His research fields include: rural development, rural sociology, food studies, agricultural and bioeconomy policy.

Terry Marsden holds the established chair of Environmental Policy and Planning in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University. He is Director of the Sustainable Places Research Institute at Cardiff. His research covers the interdisciplinary social science and applied policy fields of rural geography, rural sociology, environmental sociology, geography and planning. He has published over 150 international journal articles, book chapters or books. This includes 20 research monographs and edited collections. This body of work ranges from original theoretical work in the field to empirical analysis and emerging policy impacts and analysis. It includes wide-ranging work on: the socioeconomic restructuring of agriculture; theorizations and empirical investigations of rural development; analysis of agri-food chains and networks; and critical commentaries in the emerging fields of environmental sociology and environmental planning. The empirical work has extended from the UK, Europe, Brazil, the Caribbean and now China.

Erik Mathijs is the Director of SFERE (Sustainable Food Economies Research Group) and Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, KU Leuven. His research focusses on the practices, metrics and policies fostering the transformation of the European agricultural and food system towards sustainability and resilience. Erik Mathijs is involved in several EU projects that relate to risk management, new entrants and market management. He has been coordinator of the FP7 project TRANSMANGO (Assessment of the impact of drivers of change on Europe's food and nutrition security) and of the H2020 project SUFISA (sustainable finance for sustainable agriculture and fisheries). He acted, respectively, as rapporteur and chair of the experts group of the third (2011) and fourth (2015) Foresight Exercise for the EU's Standing Committee on Agricultural Research (SCAR).

Ana Moragues-Faus is a Senior Research Fellow at University of Barcelona and a visiting fellow at the Sustainable Places Institute, in Cardiff University. She engages in action–research processes and combines a set of critical theories such as political ecology and participative justice to support the development of more just and sustainable food systems. Her most recent work focusses on food governance, trans-local networks and the role of cities in transitioning food systems towards sustainability.

Teresa Pinto-Correia is full professor in Rural Geography, at the Department of Landscape, Environment and Planning, and since 2012 also Head of the Institute of Mediterranean Agrarian and Environmental Sciences, both at the University of Évora, Portugal. She has been the President of IALE-Europe 2012–2016. She leads the research team LABscape and is coordinator of the H2020 project SALSA (small farms, small food businesses and sustainable food and nutrition security), and takes part in a number of other H2020 projects. Since September 2019 is member of the Horizon Europe Mission Board ‘Soil Health and Food’. Her research interests focus on the dynamics of agricultural landscapes in the Mediterranean, and how they are affected by different sets of drivers, between production, consumption and protection, creating tensions but also synergies. She develops research on the landscape level provisioning of multiple services, in particular in landscapes resulting from High Nature Value farming systems, and also on the decision-making process at different scales, for the management of these landscapes.

Jet Proost is a specialist in design and facilitation of multi-stakeholder learning and dialogue processes as well as in capacity building in the agriculture and natural resource management sectors. She has an MSc from the Agricultural University Wageningen, the Netherlands in Rural Sociology, and worked as an associate professor for 20 years at this university in Innovation and Communication Studies. Her current research focus is on social learning in processes of innovation and social change. She is a Certified^® Professional Facilitator (CPF) and a Certified^® Professional Assessor of the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) and won in 2018 the silver IAF Facilitation Impact Award. Ms Proost has several publications in academic journals and for practitioners; she contributed to a number of books. Her Regional expertise covers Europe – collaboration in various partnerships in EU research projects, Netherlands – Extensive experience in public and private sectors, Oversees – Residential Burkina Faso (1985–1989), Ghana, Mali, BanglaDesh, Uganda, Kenya and South Africa (short-term missions).

Paolo Prosperi is lecturer of Agricultural and Food Economics and a researcher with experience in international, multidisciplinary and multi-actor projects. He holds a PhD in ‘Economics’ from the University of Montpellier (France). In his PhD work he has focussed on the analysis of food system dynamics by developing a theoretical and operational resilience framework for the assessment of sustainable food systems. Prior to joining the Pisa Agricultural Economics (PAGE), he has worked in the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) with Bioversity International in the project ‘Metrics of Sustainable Diets and Food Systems’, and in the EU-Tempus project QESAMED on agricultural innovation and cooperation in North African Mediterranean Countries. Since 2015, he has carried out social science research and teaching activities at the Department of Agriculture, Food and Environment, University of Pisa. He has been involved in various EU research projects on food system dynamics (e.g. SUFISA, SALSA, LIAISON, SHERPA, HealthyFoodAfrica).

Sigrid Rand studied political science, economics and Slavonic studies at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Since 2005, she has been working as a researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. Over the years, she has been carrying out research in the field of economic transformation and development of innovation systems; employment and social policy with a particular focus on skills systems; migration of skilled labour; governance of social care and long-term care. Since 2013, Sigrid Rand manages the European Network on Regional Labour Market Monitoring (EN RLMM) and is a co-editor of an annual anthology concerned with regional and local labour market monitoring.

Roberta Sonnino is a Professor in the School of Geography and Planning (Cardiff University, UK). Working across the research–policy interface, over her career she has developed an internationally renowned expertise in food politics – with a focus in particular on urban food strategies, food security, food relocalization dynamics, public food policies and place-based food governance. Professor Sonnino has been an advisor on food policy for the European Commission (including as vice-chair of the FOOD2030 expert group), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (as lead author of their first Framework of Action for the Urban Food Agenda), the Welsh Government (as a co-author of their national food strategy) and the Soil Association (on organic food procurement).

Lee-Ann Sutherland is a Researcher Leader in the Social, Economic and Geographical Sciences Group of the James Hutton Institute. She has a background in European agrarian development, human–environment relations, and farm-level decision-making. She has studied gentrification processes in agricultural restructuring and land manager relationships with the agri-environment, and has recently initiated work into farming computer games. She utilises multiple theoretical perspectives, particularly Bourdieu's conceptualization of capital exchange, the multi-level perspective and the theory of planned behaviour. Lee-Ann was a member of Scottish Government's Women in Agriculture Task Force, and leads a stream of work on agricultural restructuring and farm diversification within Scottish Government's Strategic Work Programme (2016–2021). Lee-Ann was the coordinating expert for the EIP Agri Focus Group on New Entrants to Farming (2015–2016). Lee-Ann co-ordinated the PLAID H2020 project and the FarmPath FP7 project.

Daniele Vergamini is a researcher with about 10 years of experience in international, national and regional research projects. His research work has resulted in 50+ scientific publications and other academic contributions. He holds a PhD in Agricultural, Environmental and Food Sciences and Technologies obtained from the University of Bologna. In his PhD, he focussed on the evaluation and design of economic incentives for more cost-effective EU agri-environmental measures. His PhD and subsequent research work allowed expanding his knowledge on the potential of increasing sustainability of agriculture and natural systems and related policies. Researching the evaluation of agricultural policies, he had a chance to study in particular a role of contracts, information asymmetries and property rights, exploring new methodological approaches such as experimental economics. Since 2016, he has been a researcher at the Department of Agriculture Food and Environment of the University of Pisa.