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Public food procurement (PFP) plays an important role in establishing agri-food systems. The study explores local food system stakeholders' response to PFP interventions by addressing the question of how PFP transforms agri-food systems and how this new agri-food ecosystem is governed.

This article presents and discusses a unique case study of Jeonbuk, a rural province in South Korea, which successfully transformed its agri-food system into an ecosystem through its sustainability-oriented innovations (SOIs) among born ecopreneur farmers. This case not only offers insights into a novel way to create value chains through legislative, executive and judicial governance but also extends the body of knowledge on agri-food systems by introducing the concept of an agri-food ecosystem.

The findings indicate the importance of the ecosystem governance and knowledge exchange among internal and external ecosystem stakeholders. In particular, PFP institutions play a crucial role in facilitating the operation of public meal centers and cooperation among actors.

Taking an ecosystem lens to agri-food systems may offer agricultural cooperatives a wider perspective and better understanding of the governance structures necessary to successfully execute public interventions. Lastly, the Korean case differs from other developing countries, but its role model qualities could help to implement successful school meal programs elsewhere.

This paper reviewed and applied a conceptual framework aimed at identifying the role of PFP institutions in the value chain governance by studying a case study of a South Korean local school meal program. The study further extends the agricultural cooperatives research and contributes to a better understanding of the role of a municipality and an agri-food intermediary in the governance process involving producers and kitchens.

The study aims to demonstrate that farmers' markets can represent a model of environmental, social and governance reference for modern agri-food systems facing the challenge of post COVID-19 pandemic reconstruction, responding to consumer expectations in terms of health, safety and wholesomeness of agri-food products.

A sample of consumers was surveyed in farmers' markets and social network analysis (SNA) was adopted as a methodological approach to reconstruct the links between the worlds of production and consumption and to derive the relative importance attributed to various factors that promote relational structures.

The work demonstrates the importance of sustainability – as a productive and behavioural model of firms – for the construction of efficient and durable relationship systems in two farmer markets in Sicily. In particular, four fundamental components emerge in the construction of networks represented by consumer sensitivity to sustainability processes, the individual behavioural model of purchasing and consumption, the expectation of political direction and the level and factors of knowledge of the firm. The clustering elements of the relationships were found to be the territory and local products, the environmentalist attitude and the protection of resources, as well as the adoption of a rational waste disposal policy, the fight against food waste, the encouragement of healthier and more sustainable consumption styles, clear and transparent communication and the activation of sustainable supply chain processes in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The paper aims to demonstrate how alternative food systems can become a useful model for large enterprises, which are committed to rebuilding their business strategy to overcome the current crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence about the role of the geography on agri-food firms’ valuations. The goal is to test clusters and agglomeration effects on the SMEs valuations.

The authors propose an empirical test applying a spatial regression analysis on a sample constitute by 306 agri-food SMEs located in two municipalities with different economic characteristics: Murcia and Madrid. In addition, the authors applied the discounted cash flow model in order to estimate the SMEs’ economic value.

The findings show the importance of the geography variables on the SMEs’ performances highlights interesting differences between territories. In particular, the results confirm that the geographical proximity between agri-food firms and between them and external agents is significant on firms’ valuations. The agglomeration effects are verified in both municipality but the density variable present a negative non-linear effect confirming previous studies which indicates that the existence of a large number of firms 05 rise competition, decreasing the economic opportunities of these companies.

This study gives interesting insights to policymakers, researchers and practitioners concerning the importance of the relationships among agents, also favoured by a developed infrastructures system in a fully connected environment.

Inquiring about the patterns of interaction within clusters can provide a valuable insight into the cooperation and competition strategies followed by firms. However, such internal patterns are difficult to identify using conventional methods. This study aims to apply a social network analysis approach to identify and analyze different sub-groups of firms within a dairy cluster. These sub-groups seem to respond to different forms of productive organization, with different levels of territorial anchorage.

The authors study the dairy cluster in the south-west of Uruguay, where one of the country’s main industries is located. The authors use data from semi-structured interviews applied to managing directors of 40 dairy industrial firms. The authors analyze the collaboration network among firms and industry support organizations. Using a community detection algorithm, the authors identify strategic groups of firms and organizations within the network. The authors analyze information from the interviews to delve deeper into the strategies pursued by actors in each of these sub-groups.

The four groups identified by the algorithm respond to particular logics associated not only with collaborative behavior, but also with territorial distribution and competitive strategies pursued by firms. In particular, these communities show a positive association between the centrality of their nodes in the network, the size of their firms, their export orientation and their innovative capacity. These associations indicate the co-existence, within the cluster, of different local productive systems and other forms of productive organization.

The paper illustrates how different strategies of firms within a cluster can be understood using social network analysis. This approach is particularly interesting in agri-food clusters, where their wider dispersion in the territory often implies their firms following different collaborative and competitive strategies, and different levels of territorial anchorage.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the determinants and the impact of some of the more significant innovations applied to the localised agri-food systems (LAFSs) bearing a (Geographical indication) GI product, considering the multi-faceted aspects of innovation and how the producers have managed the implementation of such innovations.

Parmigiano Reggiano (PR) system is considered as a representative GI product, with the system showing the features of an LAFS in terms of governance, territorial reputation and quality perceived by consumers. PR innovations from 1860 to 2015 are analyszed and classified as technological and organisational. Three determinants of innovations are identified in the PR LAFS: consumer needs; value chain (VC) strategies; and governance. Finally, the innovation impact on the VC, product quality and rural development are studied.

The analysis shows the positive and negative impacts of innovations. The main finding is that governance action is crucial to pursuing quality strategies and maintaining economic value at production level.

The research analyses some of the more significant innovations applied to the PR VC. Despite a large number of innovations were introduced from 1860, the authors had to choose just some of them, considering also the availability of dates.

The research gives some recommendation to the PR Consortium, in specific, or governance institutions in LAFS context in general, to achieve rural development goals. The research shows that governance action is crucial to pursuing quality strategy and to maintaining economic value at production level. This implies that instead of simply raising yield per cow, the VC should aim at increasing (or maintaining) the value of production by the way of marketing strategies. Organisational, marketing and technological innovations adopted in synergy and in joint agreement among the chain actors would bring mutual benefit for the VC and for the territory.

The research shows the trade-off between VC competiveness and rural development. In fact, the increase of VC competiveness involves a growth of cost of production and the decrease of labour force. Thus, it creates a loss of employee and increases the distance between dairies with high amount of capital and familiar/smaller dairies which have low amount of capital to invert, that obstructs rural development especially in disadvantage area.

The paper analyses the determinants and the impact of some of the more significant innovations applied to LAFS which are home to a GI product, considering the multi-faceted aspects of innovation and how producers have managed the implementation of such innovations. It underlines implication on territory and sustainability.

This paper aims to contribute to the emerging entrepreneurship research that deals with resilience by examining how embeddedness in place and in trans-local grassroots networks influences proactive entrepreneurship for local resilience.

Three theoretical propositions are developed on the basis of the existing literature. These propositions are assisted with brief empirical illustrations of grassroots innovations from the context of agri-food systems.

Embeddedness in place and in trans-local grassroots networks enables proactive entrepreneurship for local resilience. Social-cultural embeddedness in place facilitates access to local resources and legitimacy, and creation of social value in the community. Ecological embeddedness in place facilitates spotting and leveraging of environmental feedbacks and creation of ecological value. Embeddedness in trans-local grassroots networks provides entrepreneurs with unique resources, including globally transferable knowledge about sustainability challenges and practical solutions to these challenges. As result, entrepreneurship for resilience is explained as an embedding process. Embedding means attuning of practices to local places, as well as making global resources, including knowledge obtained in grassroots networks, work in local settings.

Researchers should continue developing the emerging domain of entrepreneurship for resilience.

The objective of resilience and due respect to local environment may entail a need to consider appropriate resourcing practices and organisational models.

The critical roles of place-based practices for resilience deserve more recognition in today’s globalised world.

The specific importance of the ecological dimension of embeddedness in place is emphasised. Moreover, by combining entrepreneurship and grassroots innovation literatures, which have talked past each other to date, this paper shows how local and global resources are leveraged throughout the embedding process. Thereby, it opens unexplored research avenues within the emerging domain of entrepreneurship for resilience.

In line with various scientific papers warning against an inconsistent use of this adjective for food qualification, the purpose of this paper is to point out the sweeping assertion that “local” equates to “ecological”.

Looking beyond the measurement of carbon emissions to assess impacts on the environment, this paper addresses ecological issues in terms of interactions with the environment. To this end, it enhances an under-the-skin approach that goes through “local” fruit and vegetables to look into seed management and plant breeding practices.

This method, tested with 2 vegetative species – apple and potato – on 12 case studies in Europe, allows to build a typology that discriminates between: producing food without reproducing plants, grafting trees and storing tubers for maintaining landraces, and sowing seeds to restart the breeding process from the early beginning, trying in this way to enhance the capacity of plants to better fit with their environment. The typology matches a gradient that describes various degrees of intensity of environment–society relationships, from disconnection to adaptation – conceived on the one hand as already stabilized and on the other hand as still evolving.

This analytical framework sheds light on contradictions that many local food networks have to face while yearning for a recognition by a geographical indication.

The paper argues that vegetal material might be a fruitful research object for tracking the controversies that unfold along the construction of local food products. It discusses social constructivist approaches of terroir while advocating for a materialist approach.

Buying directly from farmers online has become increasingly popular in recent years. This study aims to investigate the effect of the interaction between various consumption values that drive consumers to buy directly from farmers online. The proposed conceptual framework suggests that consumers who buy online directly from farmers are driven by an interaction of weighted individualistic consumption value (i.e. an integration of values such as saving money, getting quality and fresh produce) and collectivistic values (pro-environmental behaviour and ethnocentric perception).

Data were collected using a representative sample of 576 consumers via an online access panel and analysed using AMOS SEM.

A weighted individualistic consumption value affects consumer attitudes and, consequently, consumers' intention to buy agri-food products directly from farmers. Nonetheless, individualistic consumption value is more effective in enhancing attitudes among consumers with high pro-environmental behaviour. Moreover, ethnocentric perception lowers the effect of individualistic consumption value on attitudes and enhances the positive effect of attitudes on buying intention.

This study contributes to the literature on consumer online behaviour when buying food products directly from farmers. Its originality lies in the effect of interacting individualistic and collectivistic consumption values to explain consumer motivation for this behaviour.

Challenges from the urban–rural disparity immensely burden the world's progress fulfilling Sustainable Development Goals and the goals' central promise, particularly for developing countries experiencing rapid structural change and urbanization. A knowledge gap lies between the epistemology of urban–rural disparity and the practice of integrated urban-rural development. This paper aims to provide a new approach to bridge the knowledge gap based on the recent Chinese experience.

This qualitative research reviewed major economic and multidisciplinary studies regarding urban-rural development and the growth-equality tradeoff. Chinese experience is employed to showcase concrete challenges from the urban–rural disparity and how the proposed approach works for urban-rural integration.

Theoretical and practical approaches with urban bias largely fail to counter the challenges. Building on China's recent practice probing beyond urban bias, IFPRI (2019) proposes the term rurbanomics with a highlight of equalized urban-rural economic partnership, whereafter Zhou and Chen (2021) enrich the term into a conceptual framework. This paper further improves rurbanomics as a new viable approach to integrated urban-rural development under the overarching goal of common prosperity. The approach prioritizes driving forces in the economic, demographic, eco-environmental, social institutional and technological aspects for the policy community to leverage. Long-term mechanisms are decerned to link urban-rural integration to common prosperity.

China has leveraged ingredients of the rurbanomics approach in the political deployment to integrated urban-rural development. However, the application of this approach is yet to be adapted with local heterogeneities and live up to application's potential. Long-term mechanisms recommended by the rurbanomics approach will need to be carried out. Future improvements will need substantial theoretical extension and micro-level empirical studies.

This paper streamlines the epistemological shreds regarding pursuits, challenges, global experiences and theoretical approaches of urban-rural development. The paper also develops rurbanomics to navigate urban-rural integration, Sustainable Development Goals and common prosperity. By decerning long-term mechanisms in the Chinese case accordingly, this paper provides clues for other economies to employ the new approach.

A major earthquake and aftershocks have hit the North-East part of Italy in May 2012, and caused 26 deaths and diffuse economic damage in the localised agri-food system (LAFS) of Parmigiano-Reggiano protected designation of origin (PDO), including several dairy warehouses. In the broad mobilization to help the stricken people, the LAFS actors played a primary role, giving rise to the sales of “Parmigiano-Reggiano damaged by the earthquake” (PR-T). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the main determinants of PR-T purchasing using the theory of planned behaviour (TPB).

A survey on 200 consumers was performed. Data were collected with face-to-face interviews in stores and markets where the PR-T has been sold, and analyzed by structural equation modelling.

The TPB model predictors accounted for 52 per cent of the variance of intentions to purchase PR-T in the future and 21 per cent of the variance of behaviour. Perceived behavioural control is the main predictor of intention and behaviour, indicating that making easier the access to key resources and increasing people’s capability seems a major aspect to reach the intended goals. Trust in producers and retailers communication, positive image of the PDO label, sense of belonging to the region of origin and socio-demographics, i.e. age and educational levels, are correlated with intention and behaviour. The food scare flare up in the media was not a reason impeding purchasing PR-T.

These findings show the solidarity aspects underlying the collective purchases of PR-T in the aftermath of the 2012 earthquake waves, and the importance of increasing people’s capability and trust to reach the goal of facing dreadful food scares effectively.