Collaborative Consumption and trust building processes in the emerging new food economy

Abstract The chapter introduces and describes the concept of New Food Economy (NYE), which is defined as the result of the increasing collaboration among citizen-consumers and producers, in order to perform more sustainable, healthy and right ways to produce and consume food. This emerging phenomenon is considered as a reflexive response to the increasing food risks in the light of the recent radicalization of the systemic elements of modernity. In the current global era, indeed, people need to increase awareness and "active-trust", instead of "expert systems" and "system-trust". Starting from these considerations authors delineate a framework to analyse the trust-building processes at the base of collaboration and participation within several Italian Civic Food Networks (CFNs). In doing so, they attempt to suggest how changes in these processes may affect the empowerment ability of the networks. The results of this explorative research, in-deed, highlight the risk of a progressive "routinization of trust" in the development of the CFNs. This is a phenomenon that goes along with the need of the NFE to emerge from the niche, but it could affect the grass-roots innovation capacity that is usually attributed to these kinds of networks.