Organizing the Co-Production of Health and Environmental Values in Food Production: The Constitutional Processes in the Relationships between Italian Solidarity Purchasing Groups and Farmers

Abstract

The paper focuses on the Solidarity Purchasing Group (SPG), defined as a group of households that establishes an organization primarily to provide food to its members. The study aims at illustrating and testing two hypotheses. The first is that within the group, specific organizational processes take place according to which food communication practices determine the resource use objectives. The second hypothesis is the SPG tends to assign larger values to health and environmental protection than other resource use objectives. These hypotheses concern the ranking of the resource use objectives managed by the group. The idea is that an SPG defines the resource uses according to the specific group’s objectives and by means of organizational tools, especially the food communication practices. For testing purposes, we conducted an empirical analysis by submitting an online questionnaire to 900 Italian SPGs. The results firstly indicate that the organizational dimensions of SPGs, including the relationships between SPGs and farmers, influence the group objectives, providing empirical evidence that supports the first hypothesis. Moreover, the test of the second hypothesis indicates that group objectives concerning health and environmental protection are particularly valued by the SPGs. We then conclude that the groups are aimed at co-producing health and environmental protection with public authorities. We then underlined limits of the study and potential future research paths.