Design of a Monitoring Tool for Eco-Regions

Abstract

An Eco-Region (Biodistretto in Italian) is a rural area where different actors work together for the sustainable management of local resources, based on the principles and models of organic farming. Social, environmental, economic as well as ethical dimensions are involved. Eco-Regions are quickly growing in number in the EU and worldwide; different Eco-Regions types emerged, showing a variety of cultural, physical, socioeconomic characteristics, and related policies and regulations. The Eco-Regions represent an innovative sustainable integrated rural development approach; their success can be supported by analyzing their basic features and their development dynamics. A balance between a strictly centralized and bureaucratic Eco-Regions management and a bottom-up non-regulated Eco-Regions proliferation should be provided to grant the development of community-based resilient initiatives. To this end a monitoring tool, based on the Porter's Diamond model, involving the local actors in analyzing the Eco-Regions structure and performances, could provide useful. Previous studies defined an Eco-Region monitoring tool, where different shortcomings characterized the analytical framework definition. The goal of the present paper is therefore to define an improved monitoring tool, more consistent to the Porter's Diamond model by reviewing the cluster related literature, focusing on the Porter's approach. The integrations resulting from the literature analysis contributed to a major increase in the indicators directly related to the original Porter's approach; new food security and sovereignty, as well as specifically designed sustainability indicators have also been added. By expanding the pool of indicators, the monitoring tool is more adaptive and able to support sustainable management of Eco-Regions in different contexts.

Bioregions as an Approach to Sustainable Production and Consumption

“…In the bioregional context, organic farming could be viewed as part of the concept of bioregion development, which is an innovative and sustainable approach to rural development to transform the current food system as well as the current understanding of communities, with organic farmers playing a key role (Zanasi et al, 2020;Stotten et al ., 2017). For agriculture to be sustainable, it should be an ecologically sound, economically viable and socially responsible industry (Tambovceva, 2016) operating in accordance with policy documents.…”

Drivers affecting the relation between biodistricts and school meals initiatives: evidence from the Cilento biodistrict

“…This results in local agricultural production that is appreciated by consumers and hence has a higher market value" (European Union, 2021). The organic identity of biodistricts (Pugliese et al, 2016) involves the creation of new forms of governance and the economic, social, cultural and ethical development of the areas in which they are located (Sturla et al, 2019;Zanasi et al, 2020;Basile et al, 2021). As a result, by fostering multiple activities linked to organic farming (e.g., supplying organic food to public canteens and restaurants, direct selling and fostering agri-touristic activities), they exactly match the objectives set by Green Public Procurement (Pugliese et al, 2016;European Union, 2023).…”

Bio-districts and the territory: evidence from a regression approach

“…However, to date there are still few studies on the subject. The topics dealt with focus mainly on narration or the comparison of case studies (Belliggiano et al, 2019;Favilli et al, 2020;Pugliese et al, 2015;Stotten et al, 2017) on the definition and identification of tools to classify bio-districts and eco-regions (Franco and Pacino, 2015;Pugliese et al, 2016;Zanasi et al, 2020), on the construction of social networks that characterize the bio-districts (Dias et al, 2021), on the implementation of the bio-district tool using the agroecological (Dara Guccione and Sturla, 2021;Gargano et al, 2021;Guareschi et al, 2020) and the circular economy approach (Poponi et al, 2021).…”

“…More in detail, Belliggiano et al (2019) give a distinct partition of the regional territories where the bio-districts are born, selecting the municipalities with affinity to them, for encouraging the replication of bio-districts including them in planning strategies for the future. Awareness of the differences among the Italian bio-districts and the eco-regions in Europe has led Zanasi et al (2020) to develop an analytical framework in order to find a suitable classification tool to "reorder " these multi-actor governance structures.…”