Dear Colleagues,

Specialized, intensive agriculture, despite generally high productivity, has generated a variety of drawbacks for the environment and public health. These standardization trends reduce farmers’ ability to design tailored farming systems and the consequent optimization of local resource use. Moreover, current patterns of food production, distribution, and consumption are regarded as unable to fairly distribute added-value produce by agricultural activities and as destructive to natural resources and livelihoods in rural areas. If ecological, economic, and social sustainability is to be achieved, there is a need for urgent reform, moving away from the globally standardized approach of the current agriculture, toward a process of redesigning of food systems, driving into an effective change, from the local to the global scale. Due to the strong interdependence between production and consumption, this objective can be achieved by rethinking the role of all the actors of the agricultural sector (from producers to consumers) through transdisciplinary, participatory, and change-oriented research and action (agroecological approach). Actor-oriented, integrative, and participatory approaches of research could, therefore, be fundamental pillars to promote dynamic and properly oriented innovation processes. Organic farming, guaranteeing the respect of its fundamental principles of health, ecology, fairness, and care, represents the right context for actor-oriented research by incorporating agroecology into organic research, as the engine to promote food system sustainability.

In this Special Issue, we will explore specific ways in which actor-oriented research contributes to organic food system redesign toward sustainability. We seek contributions that accomplish this by focusing on the connections between different actors through action-research strategies as far as participatory multi-criteria analysis. We will also consider how consumer awareness strategies may affect the food system redesign, through a shift in consumption choices guided by the respect of the sustainable development of the local and global community.

Dr. Corrado Ciaccia
Dr. Fabio Tittarelli
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Participatory action research (PAR)
• co-research
• multi-criteria assessment
• agroecology
• food system redesign
• local food system
• consumer awareness
• food citizenship
• food governance