L'agricoltura nel Mediterraneo di fronte alle questioni globali

The world population is growing along with its demand for water, food and energy. Feeding the Planet means considering agriculture a priority. The Mediterranean area, with its diverse populations and particular geography, is an interesting testing ground for implementing an ecology-based agriculture

Which silos first? Analysing the Italian case through the study of Tuscany Region’s government

This paper proposes a public policies analysis of the Tuscany region’s government (Italy) during the current legislature with the aims of (1) selecting the stronger silos, at the regional level, preventing the achievement of the SDGs and (2) proposing a possible solution of multilevel governance in order to comply with policy coherence in elaborating a national strategy for the Sustainable Development. This bottom-up approach (from local to national level) wants to launch the idea that concrete initiatives can start from territories and local administrations, breaking down silos-thinking, thanks to the involvement of different departments in local projects, with the allocation of funds in an inter-sectorial perspective. This is a first attempt to provide a methodological framework for studying the implementation of the SDGs at local level. Through the lens of the Comparative Agenda Project and the Comparative Manifesto Project, we analyse the case of Tuscany region during the current legislation (2015-present) in implanting the SDGs through the involvement of different departments in local projects. Afterwards, we identify the “strong silos” to be broken on the basis of the low level of department differentiation in the allocation of funds. More precisely, we aim to investigate whether a relationship between the local government’s intentions as stated in the manifestos and its actual commitment over spending programs exists. Evidently, the policy agenda is not only about what is being discussed by political actors and their electoral purposes, but also about what they actually do once in office, where a number of institutional factors and political dynamics intervene. In the second part the paper focuses on the relationships between the regional and the national level assessing coherence with the national strategy for the Sustainable Development as described in the Voluntary National Review presented by the Italian Government at the High Level Political Forum 2017

Smart farming for food security and sustainability: facing the dilemma of small companies - the Siena Food Lab project

The relationship between smart farming and sustainability is at the centre of an open debate. The introduction of smart farming can represent an innovation and associated costs for many companies. It can lead to efficacy and effectiveness in agricultural practices, increase profits, and help address rural food insecurity. Nevertheless, small-scale enterprises can encounter difficulties when introducing smart farming and smart technologies, including start-up/conversion costs. This chapter examines the state of the art of smart agriculture in the agrifood industry, its relationships with sustainable orientation among small-scale producers, and the link to sustainable livelihoods as set out in the Sustainable Development Goals. It describes the Siena Food Lab Project, launched by the Santa Chiara Lab of the University of Siena, aiming to promote precision and smart agriculture among small companies operating in the Siena Province. Further, the chapter investigates how to improve firms' awareness of innovative solutions for achieving social sustainability and resource preservation. It demonstrates a partnership between the University and agricultural sectors in how to address eco-sustainability and livelihoods/food security of small-scale producers. Finally, the paper highlights the barriers that hinder small farmers from adopting smart farming practices and describes the benefits of establishing a dialogue among different stakeholders

Un piano per il futuro della fabbrica di Firenze. Dall’ex GKN alla Fabbrica socialmente integrata

La vicenda della fabbrica GKN di Firenze, la multinazionale britannica specializzata in componentistica auto, inizia ufficialmente il 9 luglio 2021. Pochi mesi prima, il governo Draghi aveva trovato l’accordo per la fine del blocco dei licenziamenti, introdotto dal governo Conte II in risposta alla crisi economica che si era inasprita a seguito della pandemia da Covid-19. Dalle incognite nate in questi mesi, lavoratrici e lavoratori maturano l’idea di riappropriarsi, dal punto di vista operaio, della capacità di proporre e praticare una soluzione alternativa al licenziamento, attraverso un piano di reindustrializzazione dell’ex-GKN che miri alla transizione ecologica dell’automotive e alla integrazione della fabbrica con il territorio. L’episodio dell’ex-GKN si svolge quindi all’intersezione tra la deindustrializzazione che colpisce le economie a capitalismo maturo e le trasformazioni globali che investono il settore dell’automotive, di fronte al cambiamento tecnologico e alla crisi ambientale e climatica

Sociobiological Bases of Information Structure

This work faces the sociobiological bases of Information Structure. The term ―sociobiological‖ is here taken to encompass socio-interactional and processing implications of distributing sentence contents according to presupposition/assertion, topic/focus and given/new oppositions. The socio-interactional domain explores the interplay of Information Structure units and the linguistic encoding of evidentiality, whereas the processing perspective looks into the neurocognitive underpinnings that support the decoding of informational articulations in discourse. These two approaches are put together to set forth hypotheses on the emergence of Information Structure categories in human communication. The organization of the dissertation is summarized as follows. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the main theoretical literature on Information Structure from the earliest philosophical and Praguian traditions to the more up-to-date accounts. In this chapter, the correlation between information units and precise memory stores (expressly, Short-Term Memory and Long-Term Memory) is also laid out, together with the effects of information packaging on the storage and manipulation of information in the receiver‘s mental model of discourse. Chapter 2 outlines the interaction between the discourse realization of information units and the encoding of evidential meanings. On this purpose, a broad notion of evidentiality is taken into account (i.e. a notion embracing both the speaker‘s attitude towards a proposition and the grammatical marking of its source); precisely, a taxonomy of epistemic stances elaborated by Mushin (2001) is drawn upon. Two stances are contended to be crucial for the distribution of sentence contents into more or less relevant informational units; these are referred to as personal experience and factual stance. I suggest that the former correlates with the assertion and/or focalization of some information, whereas the latter more strongly relies on its presupposition and/or topicalisation. Chapter 3 presents experimental perspectives on the processing of Information Structure units, both from psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic perspectives. An introductory part gathers some the most far-reaching achievements reported in earlier and recent works on the subject. I put forth that these findings point towards two different trends in Information Structure processing. Using a terminology widely diffused within the purview of cognitive psychology and related disciplines, I called one 13 trend bottom-up, because it follows from processing operations that capitalize on the structural cues of sentence information; the other trend has been referred to as top-down because it reveals the influence of discourse-driven expectations on the processing of upcoming utterance contents. I attributed these two processing criteria to the experimental designs adopted in the reported studies, and, particularly, to the fact that in the bottom-up modality sentences were often processed in isolation, whereas in the top-down trend they were usually embedded in a wider context of discourse. In Chapter 4, two experiments are described that confirm the role of expectation-based parsing criteria when presupposed, asserted, topicalised and focalized information is processed. It is shown that, when information structures are compliant with the receiver‘s expectations on both activation state and information packaging of contents, sentence processing is easier as opposed to when they deflect from his pre-conceived mental representation of the discourse model. Chapter 5 represents the final part of the dissertation where the considerations developed in the foregoing chapters are built on to advance some possible evolutionary hypotheses of Information Structure in human communication. Here, the aforementioned socio-interactional (evidential) and processing-based arguments are recast as exogenous and endogenous forces or, in biological terms, as nurtural and natural biases, on the gradual shaping of Information Structure units. From the nurtural perspective, it is discussed that the presupposition/assertion and topic/focus dichotomies either emerged or have been exapted to modulate epistemic stances on communicated information. In this sense, in virtue of their discursive properties, topic and presupposition may have been selected (or exapted) to mark a pragmatic meaning of factual evidentiality, therefore reducing the speaker‘s commitment to the truth of a proposition. By contrast, focus and assertion may have been selected (or exapted) to mark a meaning of personal experience evidentiality, which increases the speaker‘s degree of commitment to truth. From a natural standpoint, the development of Information Structure is addressed against the background of processing constraints which I assume to be complied with by the above mentioned bottom-up and top-down processing modalities. In other words, there are conditions of sentence processing in which discourse-driven expectations cannot be relied on (as in the case of all-new sentences). In these cases, information structural cues may have appeared to serve the function of allocating processing 14 resources according to degrees of relevance of contents to the communicative tasks at hand. On this account, focus and assertion receive more attention because they are typically more purposeful in the current exchange; conversely, topic and presupposition require a lesser amount of attention, because they are less relevant to the communicative goal. In the top-down account, the units of Information Structure may have originated in order to facilitate the recognition of activation degrees of contents. More precisely, topic and presupposition allow relating some information to recently activated and previously shared contents respectively, whereas focus and assertion allow recognizing some content as new or unshared. Easing processes of mental recall of contents turned out to be particularly adaptive in a context of mainly oral communication (but the same can be said for written communication), which is generally more transient and ephemeral. So, the human attentional system exploits the cues provided by packaging in two ways: when previous expectations on the discourse model are not available, the processor allocates resources on the basis of information packaging instructions; on the contrary, if expectations on the activation state and packaging of contents can be properly computed, these guide processing. As for this latter condition, when expectations are not met, sentence processing is more demanding than it would be when information structure is consistent with the receiver‘s pre-conceived representation of the discourse model

Fixing the business of food : Aligning food company practices with the SDGs

The 2021 Fixing the Business of Food report provides an update on the food and agribusiness sector’s alignment with the SDGs, as well as offering guidelines to help companies accomplish the change of direction needed to address this challenge.Fixing the Business of Food recommends that companies test their strategies and activities across four key areas: beneficial products and strategies, sustainable business operations and internal processes, sustainable supply and value chains, and good corporate citizenship.The report introduces this 4-pillar Framework and a set of 21 corresponding standards to lead the change towards more sustainable food systems. The report outlines the results of some empirical studies conducted to analyze the alignment of food companies with the SDGs through the framework

CultLab. Incubatore di imprese culturali creative

Sviluppare industrie culturali creative innovative come motore di sviluppo territoriale in aree collinari - sviluppo a traino cultural