Anti-Mafia Innovation network: beyond social farming

This report explores the role of rural networks in enhancing innovation processes, questioning the features of the agricultural/rural networks could enhance farmers’ ability to co-innovate in cooperation with other actors. The prospect of this investigation is also to provide interesting and significant experiences that constitute examples for the ‘European Innovation Partnership’ by increasing farmers’ capacities to create, test, implement and evaluate innovations in cooperation with other rural actors. To this end, this report focusses on the emerging rural innovation network in the so-called Land of Fires, an area between Caserta and Naples provinces in the Campania region (Southern Italy), known for the socio-economic and environmental impacts of more than two decades of waste crisis. The network involves cooperatives that work on land confiscated from the Mafia. It includes environmental activists, associations, public and private actors (citizens and companies) fighting against dispossession and contamination of territories, and against Mafia culture.