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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how social farming enterprises can foster agroecological transformation through their participation in heterogeneous infrastructural configurations that enable the flows and reinvestment of ecological, social, and economic value across territorial and organizational boundaries.

Paper long abstract

Social farming (SF) represents a novel approach to agriculture through which social services, education, and health care are delivered via farm-based activities for individuals experiencing life challenges. Positioned at the intersection of agroecology and regenerative economy practices, SF can generate socio-environmentally regenerative outcomes, including social inclusion, community resilience, food security, and enhanced resource circularity across the food value chain.

Adopting an infrastructure studies perspective, this paper examines how infrastructural configurations shape the development of regenerative loops within SF regenerative value networks (RVNs). Drawing on thirteen Italian SF initiatives, it explores how material and immaterial infrastructures, including relational, institutional, governance, and knowledge-based infrastructures, enable and constrain the emergence, maintenance, and expansion of these loops.

The findings reveal that regenerative loops emerge and stabilize where heterogeneous infrastructures can be effectively assembled into coherent socio-material configurations that facilitate the circulation and reinvestment of ecological, social, and economic resources across organizational and territorial boundaries. Conversely, fragmented institutional support, insecure land-tenure arrangements, regulatory constraints, and limited access to complementary infrastructures restrict the development of regenerative loops, often revealing the influence of productivist agrifood infrastructural legacies. The analysis further demonstrates how territorial and organizational contexts shape the capacity of SF enterprises to mobilize and reconfigure infrastructural resources to foster regenerative outcomes.

Building on these insights, the paper proposes the concept of synergistic infrastructural configurations of regeneration to advance studies of agroecological transformation by foregrounding the infrastructural conditions underpinning regenerative value creation. The findings offer implications for innovative policy interventions to advance SF across diverse territorial contexts.