Agri-food systems in transition: Potentialities and challenges of moving towards circular models

The Circular Economy (CE) has emerged as a paradigm for transitioning economic systems toward increased sustainability. The shift toward circular systems requires profound changes and presents challenges at various levels, involving a comprehensive overhaul of supply chains and systemic transformations. This paper focuses on the implementation of CE in the domain of agri-food systems, particularly analyzing olive oil production in the Apulia region, Italy. Gaining insights from the analysis of 14 key-informant interviews, eight aggregated dimensions resulted from data analysis, suited to describe the incumbent olive oil production system (structure and functioning, path-dependent mechanisms, bottlenecks, and lock-ins), its potentialities for circular transition (seeds of innovation, key design elements, enabling factors), as well as landscape forces exerting an external influence on the system (global or exogenous forces, adaptive answers). The multilevel perspective of socio-technical transitions was adopted as heuristic theoretical lens. This study represents a blueprint for future research on agri-food CE transition and contributes to orient sustainability transformations in the olive oil sector.