Proximities, distances and cooperation in the social food field[Proximité, distance et coopération]

The issue of social food sustainability highlights several challenges: giving everyone access to quality food products, limiting the ecological footprint of the agri-food sector, revitalizing territories by better combining urban and rural worlds, or even encouraging citizens' reappropriation of the sector. Today, territorial dynamics aim to resolve the tensions between economic, social, and spatial logics. These dynamics include not-for-profit organizations and cooperatives, drawn together under the designation of social and solidarity economy (SSE). There are different types of local productive systems (in terms of industrial fabric, attraction factors, specific resources) whose dynamics are closely linked to the strategies of the actors who cross them.This article aims to analyze and to demonstrate the interactions between these actors and their territorial political and economic ecosystems. First, we give a precise and argued definition of the link between SSE actors and territorial development by using the French school of proximity relations. Then we present and analyze updated cartography of these actions based on a detailed analysis of the link between proximity relations and territorial cooperation between actors. We end with a discussion about the conditions and limits of this case study. We demonstrate how these actors try to build a collective answer in touch with the local authority. The local authority encourages the exchange of good practices between them. These coordinations try to create social proximity. However, the institutional distance between these actors blocks the territorial coordination. Our article contributes to a better understanding of territorial coordination and governance between public and private actors, particularly in local social and sustainable food ecosystems.