Charitable Food Provision Networks Upon Policy Interventions: a Paired Comparison of Italy and Japan

Over the past decades, charitable food provision (CFP) has become an increasingly central component in poverty mitigation strategies as well as third sector and civil society activity in high income countries. Once conceived as an emergency response to temporary hardship, CFP now constitutes a relatively institutionalized mode of food support, operating alongside and sometimes compensating for retrenching welfare states, while simultaneously intersecting with sustainability agendas centred on food waste reduction. Despite its growing relevance, we still lack systematic comparative evidence on how CFP fields are structured, how collaborative networks within them evolve, and how field dynamics related to policy interventions enacted within institutional arenas. This paper adopts a meso-level field perspective, conceptualizing CFP as a strategic action field in which charitable organizations, public authorities, and corporate actors interact, cooperate, and compete over the organization and governance of food support. Particular attention is paid to interorganizational collaboration networks, both among food charities themselves and between charities, political and advocacy organizations, state agencies, and private firms. We ask how these networks are configured under different institutional conditions, and how they relate to distinct models of food support provision and shifting dynamics of public attention and contention around poverty, inequality, and food waste. Empirically, this paper presents a paired comparison of Italy and Japan, focusing on two major national level policy interventions aimed at reducing food waste in which charitable food providers were both precursors and affected actors: in Italy, a major legislative reform, the Gadda law, successfully approved in 2016 and in Japan, a series of policy consultation initiatives held during the 2010s led by the national government upon pressure from major charitable and environmental food providers aimed at transforming corporate practices within the industrial food supply chain (the so-called ‘one-third rule’ applied in the food retail industry) to reduce food waste that failed to crystalize into specific legislative instruments but introduced a number of voluntary changes and pilot projects within industry actors. This constitutes a most dissimilar systems design, allowing us to assess how similar organizational fields intervene in and respond to contested governance processes and to qualitatively different policy changes. The analysis draws on a large original dataset of events spanning 2005–2025, built from a curated selection of national newspaper sources and coded using semi-automatic procedures. The dataset captures resource exchanges, public speech acts, and policy relevant events shaping both the supply and demand sides of charitable food support. We pursue a twofold objective. First, we reconstruct the processes leading up to and following the two policy interventions through event sequence analysis, identifying typical trajectories and turning points in each case. Second, we examine the evolution of interorganizational collaboration networks before, during, and after these interventions, assessing their impact on field level relational structures. The paper contributes to comparative research on CFP, institutionalized contention, and organizational fields by showing how policy interventions differentially reconfigure collaborative networks in distinct institutional contexts.