Doing Transdisciplinary Action Research: A Critical Assessment of an Italian Lab-Like Sustainable Food Initiative

The food system nowadays has proven to be unsustainable from the ecological and social points of view and the need of supporting food security and sustainability through local, short-supply chain food systems is manifest. Against this background, several municipalities all over the world have started to establish multi-stakeholder collaborative roundtables to sustain participatory mechanisms directed to design new sustainable urban food strategies. Their main objective is to make Civic Food Networks (such as farmers’ markets, solidarity purchasing groups, community-supported agriculture, local physical and online food hubs, box schemes) accessible to larger sectors of the population. In this contribution, we discuss preliminary research results on Nutrire Trento (“Feeding Trento”), a local sustainable food initiative, similar to a food council, through a living lab approach inscribed in a Transdisciplinary Action Research methodology, in order to analyse its potentialities as well as its critical aspects.