FOODEV · Food and Gastronomy as leverage for local development
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-05-12 → 2018-05-11
- EU contribution
- €173,857
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Food and Gastronomy as leverage for local development
Food and gastronomy are increasingly recognized as elements of regional innovation strategies, as they are considered able to contribute to regional and economic development both in rural and urban environments. On the other hand, food has a multifunctional character, as the food system is heavily implicated in many public policy arenas. One of the main issues to be addressed to support a more sustainable and integrated approach to place development is fragmentation, both among disciplines and policies. FOODEV addressed this problem, by carrying out a multidisciplinary and multi-method research to identify determinant factors that can support sustainable approaches to place development based on food and gastronomy. FOODEV focused on: 1) providing a more holistic framework across different place development disciplines (rural development; place marketing and place branding; food tourism) to determine relevant food and gastronomy local resources transversal across domains, which might represent the core of food and gastronomy potential for place development; 2) investigating different stakeholders’ perspectives through case studies on opportunities and challenges emerging when trying to implement integrated sustainable place development strategies based on food and gastronomy; 3) investigating the “project sustainability” dimension within EU projects, through survey and semi-structured interviews to project managers and coordinators, to identify relevant factors supporting project sustainability. The research has highlighted: 1) the need of strengthening the link among food, place, and people to support more sustainable approaches to place development; 2) breaking down silos among disciplines and policies, by pursuing participatory place-based and problem-based approaches to development integrating different types of knowledge borne by multiple actors; 3) overcoming the “growth at all costs” approach towards a type of development which is coherent with place and stakeholders’ characteristics.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Food and gastronomy are increasingly recognized as elements of regional innovation strategies, contributing to regional and economic development both in rural and urban environments. On the other hand, in order to link research in food and gastronomy to that of sustainable development, it is necessary to draw from multiple disciplines, as food has a multifunctional character and the food system is heavily implicated in many public policy arenas.This proposal aims at implementing an inter-disciplinary research agenda able to determine under which conditions a certain place or region has been able to build on local features and to identify a successful sustainable development strategy based on food and gastronomy in the long-term. The project will consider the wider European policy debates on food and gastronomy as leverage for sustainable development, that will be coupled with systematic analysis of academic contributions on the topic across social and economic areas; explore factors contributing to sustainable development by the means of food and gastronomy in different projects/strategies, and according to different perspectives, will ensure to gain a systematic understanding of multiple issues and problems to be dealt with within each sector and how they interrelate, as emerging from each stakeholder category. This will build a more complex and network-like vision of knowledge, learning and innovation, which represent the concepts underpinning the emerging approach to knowledge transfer.The research action will develop reliable interdisciplinary evidence that can be used by policymakers to base their decisions on, contributing to closing the research and innovation gap through translational research approach, characterised by multi-disciplinary approaches allowing interaction between different spheres.This will contribute to the work programme by maximising experienced researcher’s contribution to knowledge-based economy and society.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- GOETEBORGS UNIVERSITET · GoeteborgCoordinatorSweden
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union