An Assessment of the Effects of Food Districts on Sustainable Management of Land: The Case of Lombardia, Italy

The article aims to analyze whether a larger diffusion of institutional–private co-operation in farming systems, such as Italian food districts (FDs), is helpful in pursuing goals of sustainable land use in agriculture. The paper focuses on the case of Lombardia in Italy, a region where this form of public–private partnership is widespread throughout the regional territory. Combining differences-in-differences (DiD) and propensity score matching (PSM) methods to reduce the estimation bias, we assessed and quantified a “district effect” on the sustainable management of lands. Specifically, using several land-use and land-use change proxies as outcome measures, we verified whether there are significant differences in such outcomes between two different groups of municipalities: those involved in FDs and those not. Our analysis shows that there is an “FD effect” on the persistence of agricultural activity and, although this does not necessarily translate into more landscape diversity, it can at least counteract detrimental tendencies such as the loss of natural elements, the loss of landscape diversity due to intensive farming, and land abandonment.