What new frontiers for the socio-economic revival of the Italian chestnut sector?

Natural resource governance cannot disregard participatory decision-making processes including different stakeholders, both public and private, and citizens. In this work, an attempt was made to actively involve at a regional scale the various stakeholders related to the chestnut wood resource. The aim is to investigate what factors should be involved to revitalise and valorise a resource that has strongly characterised European mountains. The same resource that today, at least in Italy, is now subject to abandonment or sub-management, apart from the market niches of the fruit and tannin production chains. The A’WOT methodology used is part of the multi-criteria analysis family and consists of the qualitative SWOT method combined with the quantitative analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. Starting from a SWOT analysis, 20 factors - 6 for strengths and weaknesses and 4 for opportunities and threats, respectively - were selected to create the pairwise comparison questionnaire required for the AHP. The sampling technique used was the snowball technique, and the questionnaire was administered in two different periods, between 2021 and 2022, involving 36 chestnut resource experts. A total of 20 were collected and validated (55% response rate). The results showed a strong propensity of respondents to leverage factors external to the resource, for which they have no control, as opposed to internal factors that they could manage. Specifically, the opportunity to increase awareness of the role and importance of ecosystem services, the implementation of projects targeting the chestnut tree, and the need to reduce and reverse the trend of depopulation of mountainous areas appear to be the priority factors on which to act. The results of the work point to the potential for expansion and replicability of our analysis to larger spatial scales, while also highlighting some limitations that future studies should address, such as the inherent limits of AHP depending on the objective and the need, therefore, to combine it with other multi-criteria analysis techniques and the need to stimulate stakeholders motivation to participate in such decision-making processes from the outset, otherwise there is a risk of poor adherence.