Summary for practitioners
VISION4FOOD addresses the gap between ambitious food system policies and their practical implementation at regional level. To help regions move from fragmented initiatives to coordinated action, the project developed a governance framework for Food Innovation Platforms that brings together public authorities, businesses, researchers, and civil society around shared regional missions.
Objectives
Europe’s food systems face pressures from climate change, biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and diet-related disease. Although EU and national strategies set ambitious goals, change on the ground remains slow and uneven. A key reason is weak coordination between EU priorities, 8 national strategies, and regional action. The arrangements that shape who decides, who participates, and how policy connects across scales have not kept pace with the challenge.
Results
VISION4FOOD D2.1 reviewed 27 governance frameworks used across Europe, including EU
policies, national strategies, and regional innovation approaches. The project developed a governance framework structured around four dimensions: Actors and Power, Rules and Institutions, Scale and Coordination, and Goals and Directionality. The analysis shows that implementation gaps persist, power asymmetries limit the influence of civil society and small producers, and the regional level remains under governed.
Practical implications
The practical entry point is the Food Innovation Platform, a regionally embedded, missionoriented structure connecting local experiments with wider strategies. Practitioners can use the framework to build stronger regional collaboration by bringing together public authorities, businesses, researchers, and civil society. Start with one or two concrete missions, define roles and decision rules early, and use shared indicators and regular reflection to track progress. The main benefits are clearer direction, stronger coordination, and more inclusive governance. The main costs are time, facilitation effort, and long-term commitment.
Additional dissemination and exploitation materials
- Project website: https://vision4food.eu
- Project page on CORDIS: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101183145
- VISION4FOOD on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vision4food
The VISION4FOOD FIP Founding Canvas, a practical tool for regional partners initiating a Food
Innovation Platform, will be published on the project website.
Geographical location
The research underpinning this deliverable cover governance frameworks operating across EU Member States, with examples including the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Spain, and Greece. The five VISION4FOOD pilot regions where the governance framework will be implemented are Northern Ostrobothnia in Finland, Castilla y León in Spain, Thessaly in Greece, Emilia-Romagna in Italy, and Wielkopolska in Poland. These represent diverse regional contexts, ranging from metropolitan food innovation ecosystems to rural and peri urban food production areas.
Additional information
One enabling condition that emerged consistently across both the literature and stakeholder interviews is the role of intermediary organisations. Effective governance does not simply convene actors. It depends on organisations that actively broker inclusion, translate between knowledge communities, and maintain institutional memory across political cycles. Where such intermediaries are absent or under-resourced, governance tends to default toward existing power holders.
A significant obstacle is the tension between predefined project deliverables and the emergent priorities that regional partners bring to the table. Pilot partners in VISION4FOOD explicitly named this tension and asked for flexibility in how the framework is operationalised at the regional level.
Subsequent work packages will implement the VISION4FOOD Governance Framework across the five pilot regions through structured experimentation. Monitoring and evaluation will focus on participatory decision making and perceived influence of diverse actor groups, among others. The project will publish updated guidance for Food Innovation Platform design as pilot evidence accumulates.
Key messages for practitioners: Governance design is not a one-off exercise. Frameworks that build in routines for reflection and course correction consistently outperform those treating governance as a fixed architecture. Representation matters as much as participation. Formal rules about who holds seats, who sets agendas, and who can adjudicate disputes turn consultation into genuine co-governance. The regional scale is the missing link between EU ambition and local action. Food Innovation Platforms are designed to operate in precisely that space.
Authors and affiliations: Eduardo Urias, VU Amsterdam; Britney Bulah, VU Amsterdam;
Kenneth Farald, VU Amsterdam
About this practice abstract and VISION4FOOD
This practice abstract was elaborated in VISION4FOOD project based on the EIP AGRI abstract
format.