Alternative Agrifood Networks as Learning Communities: Some Issues for a Classification Model

Recently, Alternative Agrifood Networks (AAFNs) are emerged in many countries in order to overcome limits of mainstream capital-intensive agribusiness system. Producers and consumers are brought together in different organizational forms depending on socio-economic characteristics of the reference territories. In this paper we introduce an original model to classify current worldwide AAFNs under a knowledge and learning perspective. Different organizational forms are mapped along two main dimensions: relationship types among networked groups of actors and their level of interaction/collaboration