Systems 2023, 11, 283. https://doi.org/10.3390/systems11060283 www.mdpi.com/journal/systems Article An Assessment of the Effects of Food Districts on Sustainable Management of Land: The Case of Lombardia, Italy Felice$a Carillo *, Roberto Henke * and Alberto Sturla CREA—Council for Agricultural Research and Economics—Research Centre for Policies and Bioeconomy, 00198 Rome, Italy; alberto.sturla@crea.gov.it * Correspondence: felice,a.carillo@crea.gov.it (F.C.); roberto.henke@crea.gov.it (R.H.) Abstract: The article aims to analyze whether a larger diffusion of institutional–private co-operation in farming systems, such as Italian food districts (FDs), is helpful in pursuing goals of sustainable land use in agriculture. The paper focuses on the case of Lombardia in Italy, a region where this form of public–private partnership is widespread throughout the regional territory. Combining dif- ferences-in-differences (DiD) and propensity score matching (PSM) methods to reduce the estima- tion bias, we assessed and quantified a “district effect” on the sustainable management of lands. Specifically, using several land-use and land-use change proxies as outcome measures, we verified whether there are significant differences in such outcomes between two different groups of munic- ipalities: those involved in FDs and those not. Our analysis shows that there is an “FD effect” on the persistence of agricultural activity and, although this does not necessarily translate into more land- scape diversity, it can at least counteract detrimental tendencies such as the loss of natural elements, the loss of landscape diversity due to intensive farming, and land abandonment. Keywords: food districts; land-use indices; sustainability; local systems; food district effects; impact evaluation methods; differences-in-differences; propensity score matching 1. Introduction Over the last decades, both the common agricultural policy (CAP) and national pol- icies have progressively moved towards supporting governance instruments for local food systems, aiming to encourage co-operation among economic operators and other public and private stakeholders, such as in the case of the leader approach [1]. This shift primary objective is to help individual firms to achieve common systemic goals at the territorial level, since the scale, scope, and complexity of the economic and social trans- formation necessary to reach higher sustainability levels of productive systems requires strict co-ordination between economic and institutional operators. In this paper, we empirically investigate to what extent the Italian food districts 1 (FDs), as a contractual form of aggregation at the local level, are able to trigger effective change in the agrifood system by encouraging changes in land uses and, more in general, a switch to sustainable production models. Although FDs have a clear legal connotation in Italy, in this paper, we used the term more generally, indicating different types of agri- cultural organized and normative systems. Indeed, all these systems share the objectives of enhancement of local agriculture, increasing territorial development, and increasing the role of food in the local economy. The literature exploring land use and its changes at the FD level is relatively scarce, especially in Europe. Understanding development pa,erns and drivers of changes is rel- evant to avoiding land overexploitation and preserving food security. This literature fo- cuses on determinants of land-cover changes, mainly to understand the causes of detri- mental pa,erns and to provide advice for addressing them [2–5]. In the Global North, the Citation: Carillo, F.; Henke, R.; Sturla, A. An Assessment of the Effects of Food Districts on Sustainable Management of Land: The Case of Lombardia, Italy. Systems 2023, 11, 283. h,ps://doi.org/10.3390/ systems11060283 Academic Editor: William T. Scherer Received: 2 May 2023 Revised: 26 May 2023 Accepted: 29 May 2023 Published: 1 June 2023 Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, SwiJerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons A,ribution (CC BY) license (h,ps://creativecommons.org/license s/by/4.0/).