In the European literature on the regional and local development, the concept of resilience has progressively gained momentum, eventually overcoming that of competitiveness and posing a critical challenge for the future of territorial studies and the territorialisation of the policy discourse. In the current economic turmoil, the success of an urban and regional economy relies more and more on its capacity to react to sudden shocks in a positive and evolutionary perspective, i.e., in its resilience. Nevertheless, as a recent analysis of the employment dynamics of Italian metro-regions in the period before and after 2008 has demonstrated that the existing taxonomies may be distant from reality and hardly communicable. The paper proposes a taxonomy of regional resilience based on the consideration of the region’s capacity of both improving its employment rate during the pre-crisis period and overcoming the concurrent performance of the nation. Via a shift-share analysis of the employment in Italian metro-regions, the paper investigates the contribution of the sectoral structure of the local labour market in terms of economic resilience. The result is twofold: a geography of the dynamism of the territorial systems in Italy that diverges from some “classic” interpretative frameworks; a novel taxonomic approach to regional resilience.

In recent decades, the literature on food risk has grown significantly. Consumers are increasingly interested in being informed about the relationship between the food they purchase, their health, and current sustainability goals. In this study, university students’ opinions on food quality attributes were collected through a survey in search of emerging common traits and taking into account the students’ socio-demographic characteristics. The sample for the analysis consists of 5133 students enrolled at the University of Turin (Italy), whose perceptions of food risk are analyzed using hierarchical cluster analysis and principal component analysis. The results reveal the existence of four clusters within the surveyed student population: “Detached”, “Warranty-oriented”, “Inattentive”, and “Made in Italy-oriented”. In particular, the analysis shows a significant influence of age, education level, income, and employment on students’ preferences concerning the purchasing process and food safety. The results also provide some suggestions to stakeholders, underlying the necessity to strengthen the knowledge of the origin of food products and the awareness of the challenges of the global–local food system.

Previous research identified three reasons for valuing nature (i.e., the basis for seeing nature as valuable and important): (1) valuing nature for what it gives to humans (instrumental), (2) valuing nature for its own sake (intrinsic), and (3) valuing nature because of the relationship between people and nature (relational). Of these, relational value-bases have been less studied, especially in non-Western cultures. Using a large sample (n = 2618), with participants from five distinct cultural regions (Japan, Taiwan, Italy, France, USA), the present research tests whether a three-factor framework of environmental value-bases generalizes to other cultures. Our findings demonstrate the configural and metric invariance of the recently validated Environmental Value-Bases Scale, indicating that the latent constructs generalize across sub-samples of the five regions and that the measure can be used to test associations between the value-bases and outcomes across cultures. However, we only found partial scalar invariance, suggesting (a) that caution is needed when comparing scale means between cultures and (b) that such tests are most appropriately performed using latent means. This research further contributes to the growing value-basis literature by comparing the latent means for each value-basis between and within each of the five regions and by demonstrating their associations with place attachment.

In this study, the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve (DDBR) provides the geographical context for applying an interdisciplinary socio-ecological approach to the analysis of wetland restoration based on the analytical lens of social acceptability (SA). Especially in large-scale interventions, social acceptability emerges as an underrated multidimensional concept influencing both the viability and the success of the restoration. As the Horizon RESTORE4Cs project shows, social acceptability reflects how the local community perceives and supports the decision to restore. Even technically and ecologically sound actions may face resistance if local perceptions and expectations are neglected. However, these aspects are multifaceted, depending on place-specific factors. In this study, the socio-economic, cultural and environmental features of the DDBR are examined according to the eight components of SA, that include the territorial conditions of the local context and the presence of specific values and beliefs, environmental and societal impacts, risks, and local levels of knowledge, trust, and participation. The objective is to provide a novel, socio-ecological reading of the Danube Delta system, filtered through the factors that shape the local acceptance of wetland restoration and management. Via a mixed-method approach, the SA reading of the Danube Delta reserve confirms that, even in a mostly natural socio-ecological system, the factors influencing acceptability also include some relevant institutional and cultural aspects. The assessment of these aspects, however, remains ambiguous, since DDBR experts identify trust as the weakest cultural component that locally supports the acceptability of restoration. In RESTORE4Cs, this underestimation of the cultural determinants of SA is likewise confirmed by the views of local stakeholders. This result is taken as evidence of the validity of the SA lens as a filter for an ex-ante reading of the territorial aspects that characterize a wetland socio-ecological system and its restoration management.