Research Projects

Food consumption significantly influences resource use and the environmental effects of food production and distribution. Currently a rather homogenous group of well-educated and affluent consumers is strongly interested in organic food. The mainstream food supply chains and their governance are characterised by a food regime that creates large quantities of standardised food. A more diverse food system could deliver more choices and could be more sustainable. What is lacking is a systematic and practice-oriented characterisation of diversity in the food system and its impact on resilience, enhancing socio-economic and environmental pillars of sustainability.The FOOdIVERSE project aims to produce practice-oriented knowledge on how diversity in diets, novel food supply chains

and food governance contributes to more organic and sustainable food systems. The project provides multi-level perspectives on transforming local food systems across Europe by promoting diversity of consumers, producers and key stakeholders.

More info at https://susfood-db-era.net/main/FOOdIVERSE

Consumer choices significantly influence the use of resources and environmental effects of the production, distribution, and consumption phases related to food. With the technological advances of the last decade as well as the increase in consumer driven modes of provisioning, new platforms of food provisioning have emerged that may represent significant opportunities to enable and upscale sustainable food consumption. As of now, little is known about the potential of these platforms to promote sustainability on a larger scale. PLATEFORMS aims to produce in-depth and practically oriented knowledge on how sustainable food practices can be enabled through socio-technical innovations in food provisioning platforms.

More info at: https://plateforms.oslomet.no

This SNIS project aims to examine how the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) can effectively contribute to building solidarity, protecting and integrating refugees, migrants, and the unemployed native-born within local communities and into labour markets, and what enabling policy environments are required. The potentials, challenges and tensions involved in this regard within a context of austerity and welfare retrenchment, growing xenophobia and populist politics will also be assessed. The research aims at generating evidence and policy suggestions to maximize the potential of Social Solidarity Economy Organizations (SSEOs) to integrate refugees, migrants, and the unemployed native-born at local level, and to create spaces and relationships of solidarity in times of controversy.

More info at: https://www.unige.ch/sciences-societe/sse/

European countries have witnessed the reappearance of economic and labor protests in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. Within the frame of this project, we aim to investigate, inter-alia, the following issues: the repertoire of collective action, including protests and institutional action that workers and their representative bodies engaged in; the characteristics of collective actions including the forms, the issue claimed, the scale and duration of actions; the presence of labor movements and other dynamics at work; the organizational field of actors supporting workers’ collective actions, including the analysis of trade unions and other new emerging groups; the alliances within the organizational field, its antecedents, features and outcomes, to understand how coalition building can facilitate the representation of workers, especially outsiders. Empirical analyses draw on mixed methods research: first, drawing on the well-established literature on Protest Event Analysis (PEA), we work on data collected from newspaper sources on collective action across all Italian regions since 2008. The project will also adopt a comparative perspective, by analyzing the French case and other European countries. Second, the project focuses on sector-based comparative case studies conducted within an historical perspective by placing workplace analyses into the wider market, institutional and societal environment. We intend to start with analyses of the sectors in Italy where workers experiencing precarious employment conditions, that traditional labour organizations find difficult to reach, are overrepresented such as logistics and the agricultural sector.

The main goal of this network is to bring together researchers, policy makers, and survey data producers to join efforts to improve the access, usability, dissemination and standards of the multiple and scattered survey data that exist on the economic, social and political integration of ethnic and migrant minorities (EMMs). This Action is both relevant and timely, as it will provide the mechanisms that will enhance the research capacity in Europe in the field of EMMs' economic, social and political integration, and will allow a solid and evidence based transfer of knowledge to policymakers and civil society organizations about the key consequences and social processes related to the integration of EMMs in European societies and elsewhere. The COST network will focus at once on multiplying research capacity and on transferring knowledge to a multiplicity of audiences and stakeholders. The network will achieve these goals by compiling, documenting, archiving and pooling a large amount of data coming from various comparable studies conducted around Europe, thus providing the means to improve the empirical basis of high-quality research. Data will be made available on an web-based platform or Data Hub. The Action also includes a specific research training and educational component with the aim of guaranteeing that these coordinated efforts are carried over into the future through the next generations of researchers. The Action is backed by 47 proposers undertaking research in 20 European countries and the US and its composition is balanced in terms of gender, geography, type of organization and career stage.

More info at: https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA16111/#tabs|Name:overview

The research, in collaboration with Antonia De Vita and Francesco Vittori from the University of Verona, wants to investigate new forms of citizen mobilization around consumption, production and distribution of renewable energy. It has been underlined by many that the active participation of consumers in energy issues is crucial for advancing society in the transition towards more sustainable energy systems based on renewable source production and energy efficiency. The recent EU legislation on renewable energy also focuses on the need to involve citizens in more informed choices regarding consumption and energy generation, through collective solutions, distributed generation and distributed storage. Consequently, in the literature increasing attention has been given to the study of community energy, a broad term to indicate the different forms in which citizens become energy prosumers. The majority of the literature focuses on the countries of Northern Europe while there is a lack of empirical investigations on Southern Europe, in particular with respect to the Italian case. Starting from these considerations, the research, using qualitative and quantitative methodologies, has three main objectives:

1. Map the most important initiatives regarding the participation and collective action of consumers in relation to the consumption, management, production and distribution of renewable energy at national level.

2. Investigate motivations and behaviors regarding the energy consumption of citizens participating in forms of energy civism, such as solidarity purchasing groups, energy communities, energy cooperatives;

3. Stimulate the bottom-up mobilization of consumers on the subject of energy in order to promote an efficient and sustainable management of energy resources.