Addressing Food Insecurity as a Multi-Level and Multi-Actor Governance Challenge. Insights from Four Local Strategies in Northern Italy

Current food systems are characterized by persistent inequalities, including significant levels of food insecurity that coexist with overconsumption and food waste. Despite increasing concerns, even in high-income, welfare-intensive EU countries, food insecurity and poverty remain structural challenges, with significant democratic implications. While food sovereignty and food democracy movements aim to address systemic drivers of inequalities, social policies and poverty-alleviation measures mitigate the downstream consequences of food insecurity, yet with uneven effects. Research highlights substantial variation in policy design and effectiveness (Leventi et al., 2019), strong fragmentation across policy domains and governance levels, and the predominance of emergency-driven interventions (Ferrante, 2016; Violini, 2018). In the European context, multiple funding streams, guidelines and programs often coexist in poorly integrated policy architectures (Caranci et al., 2016; Maino et al., 2016; Violini, 2018). Meanwhile, Minimum Income Schemes, acting as last-resort safety nets, present persistent shortcomings (cf. Heitlinger et al., 2024) and often fail to guarantee decent living standards or cover healthy food baskets after housing costs. Against this backdrop, food assistance practices such as food banks, pantries and social markets have expanded significantly as immediate responses to food insecurity (cf. Lambie-Mumford and Silvasti, 2020). Scholarly debates around these practices tend to range between two main perspectives (Madama, 2025). One interprets their growth as a sign of welfare state failure (Livingstone, 2015), emphasizing the lack of a rights-based approach and the risk of stigma and loss of dignity. The other highlights their potential complementarity to social policies, particularly when embedded in collaborative governance models (e.g. Berti et al., 2021). However, significant concerns persist regarding voluntary initiatives' capacity to meet demand, ensure equitable territorial distribution, and avoid shifting responsibility for structural poverty onto organizations with limited resources and accountability. Drawing from this debate, the paper aims to provide a critical assessment of existing policy architectures for tackling food insecurity, taking a bottom-up approach that examines challenges in vertical and horizontal coordination and cooperation in multi-level, multi-actor settings, often not examined holistically in research. More specifically, the study focuses on four selected territorial contexts in Northern Italy to analytically reconstruct the layered configuration of institutional programmes and funding flows (the cascade from EU instruments such as FEAD/ESF+ to national and regional/local funds) to qualify the resulting local strategies. Relying on qualitative research techniques, the study aims at assessing the coherence of current multi-level multi-actor frameworks, their capacity to enable effective and integrated responses to food insecurity. The findings reveal inconsistent vertical alignment, limited horizontal coordination, and short-term programming cycles. At the same time, some elements align with a multidimensional understanding of food poverty and instruments that extend beyond food provision. By documenting how local actors creatively assemble resources and negotiate roles to compensate for institutional gaps, the paper highlights both the constraints and the potential of local food governance arrangements to foster more inclusive, resilient, and democratically grounded responses to food insecurity. It concludes with evidence-based recommendations for enhancing coordination, strengthening participatory mechanisms, and supporting policy change toward more equitable and sustainable local food systems.