José María García Álvarez-Coque

En el siglo XXI, los mercados alimentarios enfrentan turbulencias marcadas por el alza de los costes energéticos y tensiones geopolíticas, que afectan los precios de los alimentos. Este trabajo evalúa la evolución de dichos precios y su relación con la energía, con un enfoque en propuestas para mejorar la cadena agroalimentaria de la Comunitat Valenciana. A partir de un diagnóstico basado en datos estadísticos, se desarrollaron talleres multi-actor que identificaron mejoras desde una visión participativa. Las propuestas incluyen superar la atomización del sector, optimizar la logística y la digitalización, fomentar la colaboración público-privada y promover innovaciones tecnológicas y organizativas. Además, se subraya la necesidad de garantizar transparencia en la cadena, educar en hábitos de nutrición responsable, y reconocer la responsabilidad compartida en asegurar el derecho a la alimentación, lo cual implica transformaciones normativas y culturales en la sociedad.

Summary: Land abandonment and the lack of generational renewal in farming are serious issues in European agriculture with social, environmental and economic implications. This article reports on the recent experiences of joint cropland management (JCM) in Spain. These initiatives are based on the grouping of plots to achieve different objectives through social and organisational innovation. JCM involves three types of actor: landowners, cooperatives and the people who cultivate the land, who may or may not be landowners or members of the cooperative. Implementation of this strategy, which is being adopted by an increasing number of agri‐food marketing cooperatives, requires substantial social capital. Therefore, collaboration between public and private actors is needed to generate and transfer knowledge on these initiatives. The Operational Group on Social Innovation in Land Management (GO_InnoLand) was created in 2020 to support JCM processes, which help young farmers who are setting up in the agricultural sector. JCM initiatives could be one way to prevent the abandonment of small‐scale land plots and drive the demographic challenge. Public policies can support this strategy by enhancing social and organisational innovation, facilitating financial instruments, providing technical assistance, improving collaboration networks and linking landholders with new professionals.

Aim of study: This study reviews the state of the art of collaboration for social innovation in food and rural systems. The analysis focuses on cooperation by farms and agro-industry companies. The purpose is to identify not only the state of the art of this research topic but also the main authors, the countries where these studies are conducted and the dynamics of research networks in relation to these topics. Area of study: Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Material and methods: The Web of Science database was used to search for articles containing the terms ‘cooperation’, ‘networks’, ‘innovation’, ‘social’, ‘rural’ and ‘LAC’. Using VOSviewer network creation and analysis software, maps of citations, co-authorship, co-citations and co-occurrence of key-words were created and analysed. Content analysis was then performed. Finally, the research areas that the authors of the analysed articles consider to be of interest for future research were identified. Main results: The results reveal that researchers from Latin America and other regions, especially Europe and the English-speaking world, are showing a growing interest in collaborative systems for development and social innovation in LAC. Research highlights: The analysis enables further progress to be made in identifying the main drivers of collaboration in the LAC rural sector. These main drivers include social innovation, knowledge, sustainable management and social capital.

European Political Science (EPS) has been a leading political science journal since its launch in 2001. This article examines the contribution of European Political Science over its 20-year history. The bibliometric analysis draws on Web of Science data and VOSviewer software. These tools help detect collaboration networks, bibliographic coupling and co-citations to identify the most relevant topics and knowledge appearing in European Political Science . The evaluation of EPS reveals four areas of interest: migration, education, comparative politics and democracy. Recent interests include the current debate on populisms, social media and political parties, with antecedents and implications that transcend national boundaries.

Based on fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), this paper examines the interactions between the presence or absence of regional and national top-ranked research universities and other innovation-related conditions that foster regional competitiveness in the European Union context. We evaluated the effect of a region’s membership in different regional clusters as characterized by the following conditions: inter-firm collaboration in innovation activities, public R&D expenditure, private R&D expenditure as well as ranking in the list of the world’s top 300 (or top 100) universities. As one region might benefit from the presence of a local top-ranked university and/or from spillover effects from other national universities, we distinguish between the presence of universities within the region or elsewhere in the same country. Our results suggest that some conditions are necessary to achieve the outcome of being a “competitive region,” including having at least one top-300-ranked university in the same country (EU member state). Nevertheless, this attribute is not individually sufficient to incur the outcome of regional competitiveness. Our findings support the idea that the closeness of top-ranked universities does not itself guarantee regional competitiveness; instead, having an excellent research university within the same member state is only one of numerous configurations which may lead to a region’s success. These results support evidence in recent literature that leading research universities may be geographically connected to a wide network of actors with external knowledge interactions.