Spaces of Governance for Sustainable Transformation of Local Food Systems: the Case of 8 biodistricts in Tuscany

Faced with higher risks from climate change, food systems will need to transition away from dominant industrial paradigms and move towards a more sustainable way of producing, distributing, and consuming food. For sustainability transitions to happen, there is increased acknowledgment that lower administrative levels and local territorial arrangements are fundamental for policymaking, implementation, and impactful action. To go beyond two well-known criticisms of local food sustainable initiatives, i.e., to be rather small and to be developed outside policy frameworks and/or in stark opposition to current food systems, we argue in this paper to look at new meso-spaces of transformation at local level such as biodistricts, where community members, professionals, and governments get together to share knowledge, deliberate, and collectively devise place-based strategies to address complex food systems issues. We analyse 8 biodistricts in Tuscany and, as a result of the analysis, we argue that biodistricts can potentially act as territorial meso-spaces at local level, favouring the transformation towards sustainability of food systems.