Bio-districts and rural vitality: governance, place-based practices, and structural constraints in Italy and Sweden

Bio-districts are territorial governance arrangements that seek to integrate organic agriculture with broader rural development objectives through multi-actor collaboration, but limited empirical evidence exists on the processes through which they contribute to the vitality of rural areas. This study examines how bio-district governance arrangements and multi-actor collaboration contribute to rural vital- ity, and what challenges constrain this contribution, drawing on the conceptualization of rural vitality as a systemic, place-based, and holistic process. A comparative qualitative case study was conducted in two European bio-districts, the Bio-distretto del Cilento (Italy) and Ekodistrikt Sörmland (Sweden), based on 30 semi-structured interviews with farmers, coordinators, municipal officials, cooperative members, and food-sector practitioners, analyzed through inductive thematic analysis. The findings identify three interconnected dimensions through which bio-districts shape rural vitality. First, collaborative governance connects otherwise fragmented actors through recurring forms of interaction, including festivals, public meal systems, cooperative structures, and producer networks, that sustain coordination across sectors and scales. Second, place-based cultural practices, the recovery of heritage varieties, the transmission of local food knowledge, and the intercultural mediation of food traditions within diverse communi- ties, sustain participation and territorial identity. Third, economic diversification operates through synergistic combinations of on-farm processing, direct sales, agritourism, and public procurement that jointly generate competitiveness and attractiveness. However, structural constraints, including institutional fragmentation, market concentration, demographic pressures, and short-term funding, limit the reach and continuity of these processes. The two cases reveal that similar governance functions can be enacted through different institutional repertoires: locally embedded and culturally anchored in Cilento, and more formalized and welfare-mediated in Sörmland. The study contributes to the rural vitality literature by documenting the relational and organizational processes through which vitality is produced in practice, and identifies the conditions under which biodistricts function as inclusive mechanisms of territorial development rather than as arrangements benefiting only already-engaged actors.