CULTIVATE White Paper: Lessons from Policy Dialogues

Food sharing, partnerships, infrastructure and social cohesion in Milan, Barcelona and Utrecht

Rather than answering a specific research question, this White Paper compiles a rich field of experience that will help shape future research agendas. It synthesises the findings of three policy dialogues held in Milan, Barcelona and Utrecht, in the framework of the EU Horizon project CULTIVATE, and takes food sharing initiatives (FSIs) as its throughline — the concrete practice against which the dialogues’ findings are read. 

 Utrecht’s dialogue looked directly at what FSIs can deliver: wellbeing, social connectedness, health. Barcelona’s dialogue, on wholesale markets as infrastructure for the social and solidarity economy, asks where such initiatives can be physically anchored and scale. Milan’s dialogue, on public-private partnerships for sustainability and food waste reduction, informs debates about what kind of governance models can give FSIs the institutional legs to move from local experiment to lasting infrastructure. Read together, the three dialogues trace a single arc around food sharing — its social purpose, the infrastructure that can host it, and the partnerships that can sustain it. 

 What makes these dialogues distinctive is not the topics themselves, but the method: each city was asked to engage with an issue that was not its own, reacting to another city’s priorities rather than restating its own agenda. Policymakers, scholars and civil society organisations sat at the same table, and the resulting material carries the texture of that friction — diverse urban experiences invited to speak to one another. 

 This White Paper is built to travel. Its findings are organised around concrete, transferable arguments rather than city-specific case narratives, so a reader from another city can situate their own questions in someone else’s experience. It is meant to be picked apart, quoted, and put to use — the beginning of a conversation across European cities, not a record of one that has already ended.