Neo-Endogenous Rural Development in Favor of Organic Farming: Two Case Studies from Italian Fragile Areas

Abstract

This paper analyses two case studies ascribable to neo-endogenous paradigm for rural development experimented by two small municipalities in Northern (Varese Ligure) and Central-southern (Castel del Giudice) Italian Apennines. By means of different approaches, the two towns have been able to provide local development through organic farming that in turn have boosted economic diversification or new forms of territorial aggregation. They have drawn the attention to the neighbouring communities and have stimulated emulation processes. Through a multivariate analysis this study therefore gets to a distinct partition of the two regional territories (NUTS2), where the cases belong, identifying the municipalities that show greater affinity to the cases in question, in order to offer to policy makers useful elements either for encouraging the replication of best practices or including them in future planning strategies. However, while the cluster that includes Varese Ligure (in Northern Italy) appears more clearly influenced by environmental values and a certain demographic resilience, the one to which Castel del Giudice belongs (in the Center-South) is more influenced by the aging of the population and by a greater structural dependency. Both clusters, however, could find a common way of development centred on the economic potential offered by organic farming due to the affinity shown by the proposed case studies.

New frontiers in the teaching of the agricultural enterprise: elements for a debate

“…Un terzo ambito di analisi, strettamente legato ai primi due, è quello della valorizzazione del patrimonio culturale sotteso alle pratiche agricole e al turismo rurale (Belliggiano et al, 2021). L'implicita centralità dell'agricoltura nella convenzione di Faro, in quanto naturale custode del patrimonio immateriale dei contesti rurali (Ray, 2001), offre infatti alla stessa nuove opportunità per contribuire alla rigenerazione delle aree interne o marginali (Paffarini et al, 2021;Bindi et al, 2022), sollecitando le imprese verso nuovi obiettivi produttivi e nuove forme organizzative (Belliggiano et al, 2020), mobilitate in una più diretta partecipazione ai processi di programmazione dello sviluppo del territorio (Labianca et al, 2020).…”

Sense of Place, Biocultural Heritage, and Sustainable Knowledge and Practices in Three Italian Rural Regeneration Processes

“…This new outlook on rurality is established through multi-scale local policies, from the overall CAP frames to the proximity of the Local Action Groups (LAGs)' actions within the LEADER approach. In Italy, other levels of intervention have more recently been associated with them, specifically oriented to the areas of greatest fragility, such as the SNAI [29,30] and the CIS [31], as well as more recently all actions explicitly addressed by the National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI) and the Italian National Plan for Recovery and Resilience (PNRR). In each of these institutional programs, the emphasis is on overcoming the exogenous (or top-down) approach in favor of an endogenous one.…”

“…Others had to be conducted entirely online due to the social distancing imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the use of different survey criteria imposed by the particular pandemic conditions did not imply significant problems of involvement and/or participation of the actors nor of detection and interpretation of the data, thanks to the author's long-term and deep awareness of local contexts [30,31,51].…”

The “Smart Village” as a Way to Achieve Sustainable Development in Rural Areas of Poland

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