The role of bio-districts in shaping rural development: a social sustainability perspective

Bio-districts represent place-based social innovation initiatives that integrate organic agriculture, participatory governance, and local value chains to foster sustainable rural development. While their environmental and economic contributions have been widely acknowledged, the social dimension remains insufficiently examined. This doctoral research addresses this gap by developing a comprehensive, qualitative framework to assess the social sustainability of bio-districts, with a focus on individual and community well-being. Structured across three core chapters, the study begins with a literature review that critically examines existing sustainability evaluation tools—such as SAFA and S-LCA—highlighting their limited capacity to capture relational, processual, and subjective aspects of social sustainability. The second chapter presents empirical insights from case studies in Italy and Sweden, exploring how governance structures, stakeholder collaboration, and territorial identity influence social outcomes. Findings reveal both enabling factors, including strong local networks and policy engagement, and challenges such as power asymmetries, generational divides, and institutional fragmentation. The final chapter introduces a stakeholder-driven assessment framework grounded in an adapted Multi-Actor Multi-Criteria Analysis (MAMCA) approach. The framework organizes social sustainability into two core dimensions: individual-level (e.g., decent livelihood, human capital) and community-level (e.g., shared vision, social capital), further operationalized through eight themes and 18 sub-themes. These were informed by thematic analysis of interviews and validated through literature review.