Sustainable agri-food field and network: what perspectives in Northern Mediterranean?

Global food system has developed in such a way that is unsustainable, generating inequalities and negative externalities for both human and nature. The unsustainable practices and the longer distance between different links of food value chains altogether jeopardize today food security (FS) and its future development since a sustainable FS relies heavily on the proper functioning of ecosystems. In order to face these challenges, interorganizational network are currently developing across territories. This communication aim at better understanding the initiation of transnational networking of local actors networks in the sustainable agri-food field. Thus, as part of the transformation of the global and dominant food system towards territorial and sustainable food systems, we aim to better understand why stakeholders from urban and peri urban metropolises engage in transnational networking and what are their expectations related to transnational networking activities. Within this framework, we have structured this paper around the following research question: How does transnational networking could meet the expectations of North-Mediterranean territorial stakeholders in the field of sustainable food and agriculture? To do so, we are trying to let emerge a shared cognitive structure (Knight, 2002) of the networked managerial practices and desired changes. For this purpose, an exploratory, qualitative, semi-inductive approach is adopted in order to study managerial representations of the actors regarding the network under construction. We realize a longitudinal and embedded case study of a Mediterranean transnational cooperation project related to sustainable urban and periurban agriculture initiated as part of a European Interreg-med project MADRE. The embedded case study encompass six analytical sub-units: Barcelona (Spain), Montpellier, Marseille (France), Bologna (Italy), Thessaloniki (Greece) and Tirana (Albania).