Pathways of change in social farming: how to build new policies

Social farming is an emerging issue in many EU Countries linked to an increasing attention devoted to different aspects of multifunctional agriculture as well as to the recent concerns for public health expenditures and efficacy of social services. All over rural Europe, there is a widespread and rich patrimony of diverse agricultural realities – inherited from the past or created more recently - which are characterised by such a distinctive, sound relation between practices of farming and practices for social inclusion. In many cases these experiences were born autonomously, behind the personal, strong ethical believes and motivations of their promoters, who carried out in isolation a function of collective interest, mostly invisibly. As a matter of fact, the ‘invisibility’ of such reality, is represented by the lack of a defined juridical/institutional framework for social farming, in most countries and at European level. The paper focus the attention on social farming as a process of social innovation where collective learning, bottom-up approaches and practices rooted on local experiences is producing a process of radical change. In this process a specific role seems to be played by the organisation of policy networks at regional, national and EU level. Their role is to act in order to improve awareness and to advocate public attention and resources, to increase knowledge and evidences, and, at the main time, to organise a juridical/institutional framework able to affirm a different culture of caring of less empowered people linked to a different utility of agricultural resources.