A territorial approach to Values Based Food Chains – a comparison of three organic regions in Europe

In recent years within many European countries aspirations emerged to establish model regions of sustainability. One way to operationalize this is the creation of ‘organic regions’. Organic regions base their territorial development on principles derived from organic farming to develop sustaina-ble food chains as well as to transfer them to the other sectors, like energy, waste management or housing on a regional scale. They aim to establish a commonly shared set of values within a certain area to support sustainable lifestyle and agriculture as well as rural development. These approach-es are still young and little is known about their establishment. At the same time, the concept of values based food chains (VBFC) emerged to analyze a new type of supply chain configuration, which is again based on shared values. Therefore, we investigated three different organic regions in Italy, France and Austria to elicit whether and how such values based food chains are imple-mented on a territorial level in ‘organic regions’. Further it is highlighted if and how regional coher-ence can be achieved within such ‘territorial values based food chains’ and which bottlenecks be-come apparent during this process. The examination of their historical development as well as their integration into current administra-tive structures and their performance provides different examples of implementation in the three case studies under investigation. The success of such territorial VBFCs relies mainly on endogenous factors, such as the initiating stakeholders within the rural development process as well as the will-ingness of the local population to participate. Therefore, the aim is to figure out, how different his-torical path dependencies and different administrative (political) frameworks can lead to perform regional coherence. Finally the question arose whether and under which institutional arrangement VBFCs can be a starting point for territorial approaches or their result