Quality agri-food districts, typical products, local governance

The paper is focused on the coexistence of different organisational patterns of local productions; the goal is to evaluate which local governance may be more appropriate in a globalized agro-food scenery. We analyze, through the spatial analysis tools, some PDO/PGI products in two Italian regions, Veneto and Emilia Romagna, which adopted very different strategies. The spatial analysis allows to select the most appropriate indicators at municipality level in order to identify homogeneous local systems, reducing the complexity of the issues to be addressed in the definition of their geographic boundaries. The results of our analysis allow to evaluate the approaches used by Emilia Romagna and Veneto and highlight the strengths and weaknesses of two different models of the agro-food districts.