Rural areas receptivity to innovative and sustainable agrifood processes. A case study in a viticultural territory of Central Spain

Abstract

The objective of this work is to determine the perception, in terms of sustainability, of stakeholders involved in an innovative process developed in a rural area. The innovative process focuses on the introduction of green technologies and low carbon emissions linked to the product and the process in the context of a circular economy model. The methodology is based on a variation of the MESMIS evaluation framework through which ex ante sustainability is analysed following the participatory process using focus group techniques. The results show that acceptance is conditional on obtaining positive economic results from farmers and wineries. The local scale of implementation of the project and the identification with technology based on the use of endogenous resources such as microalgae by the label of origin of the wine are factors that favoured the interest of the participatory process to address the sustainability of innovative technology.

Sustainable Innovation in Wine Industry

“…Local and small-scale innovations are of high importance. The collaborative business model is favorable for this kind of innovation, since its complexity requires local experiments that are easily applicable and enable interaction with local actors (Losada et al, 2019).…”

Bridging roles of social innovations in rural development: craft initiatives from Kutch, India

“…Rural capitals framework coined by Castle (1998) is a comprehensive tool to study rural and specifically helpful to elaborate notion of creative destruction in neo-endogenous development approaches (Chevalier & Vollet, 2019;de Fátima Ferreiro & Sousa, 2019;Gamito & Madureira, 2019;Losada et al, 2019;Rantamäki & Kattilakoski, 2019). Rural capitals framework identifies the following four capitals: man-made, natural, human, and social capitals.…”

Regional Implications of the Circular Economy and Food Greentech Companies

“…Governments aim to develop more sustainable, collaborative and resilient societies and urban and rural spaces to support more responsible behavior [11,12]. This means that there is urgent need for innovative new models of social, cultural, economic and environmental development to promote sustainable regional development [13][14][15]. New policies need to be developed that promote green entrepreneurship and sustainable, socially innovative regional strategies [16][17][18].…”

“…Reforming the food sector is a good way of responding to this which also encourages investment in technological innovation and regional progress [19,20]. Many sustainable measures have already been instigated in Europe which promote innovative eco-solutions that limit the production of and encourage the reuse of food waste [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. The circular economy movement encourages this important transformation and requires people to move towards sustainable behavior and retain the intrinsic value of products, for as long as possible, in the economic cycle.…”