The impacts of resilience practices on local food systems: evidences from Italian case studies

The research aims to provide an impact evaluation for assessing the application of bottom-up practices aimed at strengthening territorial resilience. Particularly, the research considers a set of local practices that joined the Observatory of Resilience Practices (ORP from now on), a project started in 2015, funded by the Cariplo Foundation, and conducted by the Politecnico di Milano. The ORP collected practices that aimed at strengthening territorial resilience on the different dimensions of sustainability (social, cultural, environmental, economic). The ORP has organized the Resilience Practices Forums to implement a network and develop discussions, mutual enrichment, and shared reflections among the many subjects involved with different roles and interests in the promotion and implementation of resilience practices. The research focused on selected practices involved in the RPO project that acted on agri-environmental issues, as an opportunity to investigate the different dimensions of the territory thanks to the polyhedral lens of food. At a distance of 4 years the authors retain fundamental to understand if the practices have achieved the expected results, what obstacles and barriers have occurred in the implementation, what exogenous factors have modified the environmental, social, and economic context where the practices operate and how new balances were overcome, and the unexpected impacts produced by the application of the practice on the territory. The research has been conducted through a computer-assisted web interviewing survey handed to the list of contacts contained in the ORP database.