How alternative food networks (AFNs) diffuse and work: a relational approach

In the last decades, food movements have constituted a significant part of those mobilisations that put at their centre everyday practices as forms of direct action (Bosi and Zamponi 2020), against the commodification and acceleration of life. They have thus become important agents of innovation, promoting forms of sustainable production and consumption on social, ecologic and economic levels. Local communal food initiatives, in particular those called alternative food networks (AFNs), have spread all over the world. By shortening the distance between producers and consumers such initiatives have been able to bring about substantive changes to the current global food system, reworking food as a means to build concrete practice-based actions that showed how food is more than only eating and satisfying daily nutritional needs. Local and community food initiatives have also been surprisingly influential in shaping both national and international agri-food policy as well as individual consumer practices, by helping to raise attention to issues such as animal welfare, GMOs, pesticide and antibiotic residues, land grab, and, most recently, agri-food’s contribution to climate disruption (Antoni-Komar et. al. 2021). Food movements propose everyday practices to target the current, industrialised food systems showing how advanced capitalist societies are undergoing a food crisis due to a global food system that is highly specialised and dominated by transnational corporations. Promoting “agroecology principle and practices”, to foster efficient and sustainable agricultural production, is one of their key proposal. However, the transference of those principles into practice encounters several obstacles, which often restrict the capacity of such initiatives to expand beyond niche markets. The proposed paper discusses the results of an extensive fieldwork conducted on the territory of the Autonomous Province of Trento (Northeast of Italy). By combining network analysis with diffusion of innovation theory, our study will examine how alternative food networks are formed, work and diffuse by looking at the characteristics of the actors involved in such efforts, their practices and frames as well as at the types of ties linking them. In particular, data will be examined to understand mechanisms of diffusion and how networks structures affect the mobilization capacity of such efforts in term of adoption of new understandings, procedures and organizational forms.