AUTHOR=Packer Giacomo , Zanasi Cesare 

TITLE=Comparing social sustainability assessment indicators and tools for bio-districts: building an analytical framework

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems

VOLUME=Volume 7 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-systems/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2023.1229505

DOI=10.3389/fsufs.2023.1229505

ISSN=2571-581X

ABSTRACT=The challenges of climate change, population growth and unstable socio-economic conditions are testing the capacity of food systems to produce more food with diminishing natural resources. As a result, alternative production and consumption systems are at the center of economic and political debate. Bio-districts are a practical example of a sustainable food system which uses agroecological principles as tools for rural development. This research aims to understand the role of bio-districts in sustainable development, particularly in relation to social impacts. It does so by developing a framework for assessing social impacts in the context of alternative food systems. To this end, a two-step methodology is adopted. In the first part, a systematic literature review is carried out according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol. It presents the state of the art in social impact assessment of bio-districts, identifying the approaches and indicators used to assess social standards, codes of good practice and, more generally, the factors influencing social sustainability in rural areas. In addition, a set of social themes is developed and validated through a content analysis to uncover the trends in the debate on social sustainability in bio-districts. In the second part, promising analytical frameworks and tools from the literature are compared on the basis of how deeply they assess social issues related to biodistricts. Finally, a description of the main steps that should be taken to adapt existing tools and frameworks to the local context is presented. 1 In this paper the expression bio-district is used as it univocally describes the integrated territorial and rural development strategy and it has been adopted by the European Commission in the Action Plan for the Development of Organic Production (EC, 2021); while the term ecoregion can be used to describe geospatial areas with specific patterns of environmental and ecological variables (Abell et al., 2008).