Publications
NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.
2026
Abstract
Despite the growing use of heritagization in describing how food and food-related practices become cultural heritage, important questions remain regarding what characterizes heritagization and its internal dynamics. This article advances studies on heritagization by applying cultural adaptation work (CAW) to apple festivals. Whereas CAW has been conceptualized within Norway’s regime of geographical indications (GIs) as a rule-bound regulatory institution, we revise and extend that conceptualization by (i) relocating CAW to a hybrid institutional arena where protected GIs (PGIs) and festivals meet; (ii) specifying how CAW’s adaptive practices – translation, reorganization, and transformation – operate as mechanisms that generate recognition, legitimization, and valorization; and (iii) foregrounding festival publics, pedagogy, and experimentation as drivers of adaptation. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Norway at three apple-based PGI festivals and, for comparison, one non-PGI apple festival, we show how bottom-up festivalization recalibrates the top-down governance of GIs and yields both intended outcomes and unintended frictions. By shifting analysis from stage models to patterned work on living heritage, the CAW-in-GI-festivals approach makes adaptation practices visible and comparable across cases. In turn, it clarifies food heritagization’s internal dynamics and offers a lens on agri-food domains where de jure certification regimes intersect with de facto experiential publics.
Authors
Zhe Yu Yihui Du Qianwen Ding Qiang Hao Hongwei Yang Kerou Shi Chao Ran Yalin Yang Chen Wang Johan Johansen Giovanna Ottaviani Aalmo Zhen Zhang Zhigang ZhouAbstract
Global food security demands sustainable alternatives to the conventional feed ingredient wheat. Nutrient-dense diploid potatoes (HQP) represent candidates due to their enriched phytochemical profiles, including high levels of vitamin C and lutein. However, their dietary utilization is constrained by endogenous anti-nutritional factors (ANFs), primarily solanine and trypsin inhibitors. Using a zebrafish model, we demonstrate that these ANFs trigger intestinal dysbiosis and an oxidative-inflammatory response. Mechanistically, this adverse gut environment suppresses the mTOR pathway, as evidenced by reduced phosphorylation of S6K1 and 4E-BP1, ultimately leading to growth depression. To address this toxicological barrier, we integrated genetic selection (diploid HQP) with thermal processing (steam-cooking). Quantitative analysis revealed that while thermal processing effectively reduced ANF concentrations to physiologically safe levels, the HQP matrix retained significantly higher residual concentrations of vitamin C, lutein, and zeaxanthin compared to conventional tetraploid (C88) and wheat-based diets. Mechanistically, protein-level evidence confirmed that this processed HQP formulation promoted the total NRF2 and suppressed NF-κB P65 accumulation. This metabolic shift attenuated inflammation, reactivated mTOR signaling, and subsequently enhanced growth performance and digestive capacity. Our findings establish a mechanistic framework demonstrating how integrated genomic design and processing strategies facilitate the functional utilization of high-phytochemical crops in sustainable food systems.
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Authors
Lampros LamprinakisAbstract
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Authors
Habtamu AlemAbstract
The lecture provides practical guidance on research proposal development and international funding opportunities, with a particular focus on Horizon Europe. It covers how to identify suitable funding calls, understand call requirements and eligibility, develop competitive research ideas, formulate clear and measurable objectives, and design a sound research methodology. It also explains the main components of a Horizon Europe proposal, including Part A and Part B, and provides step-by-step guidance on writing the Excellence, Impact, and Implementation sections. The lecture further addresses international partnership and consortium building, work packages, deliverables, milestones, risks, staff effort, budget allocation, dissemination, exploitation, communication, and proposal evaluation criteria. Real and illustrative project examples, including collaborations between Norwegian and African universities, are used to connect proposal-writing principles with practical research funding experience.
Authors
Habtamu AlemAbstract
Decarbonising electricity does not necessarily translate into lower economy-wide fossil-energy use because coal, oil and natural gas can remain embedded in transport, heating and industry. This study assesses how low-carbon electricity portfolios are associated with economy-wide fossil-fuel dependence across 26 European Union member states during 1990–2024. The main outcome is the fossil share of total primary energy, complemented by robustness outcomes for fossil primary energy per capita and absolute fossil primary energy to distinguish changes in the fossil share from changes in fossil-energy quantities. Two-way fixed effects, Driscoll–Kraay inference and pooled common-correlated-effects estimation are combined with temporal-ordering, sub-period, multicollinearity, sample-restriction and country-heterogeneity diagnostics. Non-bioenergy renewable and nuclear electricity show the most consistent negative associations with fossil dependence. A ten-percentage-point increase in non-bioenergy renewable electricity is associated with approximately 2.9–3.2 percentage points lower fossil dependence; the corresponding nuclear association is approximately 3.5–3.9 points. The negative associations also persist for fossil energy per capita and absolute fossil energy, reducing concern that the headline result is driven solely by the denominator of the primary-energy share. Bioenergy evidence remains inference- and period-sensitive. The renewable lead is positive, but its statistical significance varies with the covariance estimator, reinforcing rather than resolving the endogeneity boundary. The results therefore support comparative system assessment of lower fossil reliance, electrification, flexibility and resilient low-carbon capacity, but not causal technology claims. © 2026 The Author(s).
Authors
Giovanna Ottaviani AalmoAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
María Bustamante Liria Concetta Maria Messina Simona Manuguerra Andrea Santulli Giovanna Ottaviani AalmoAbstract
Despite significant progress in understanding the complexity of food systems’ challenges, there remains a lack of clarity around how these systems can undergo transformative change and what is required to enable such shifts. This paper focuses on social innovation as a promising mechanism for addressing structural challenges and reconfiguring food systems toward sustainability, equity, justice, and resilience. Our main contribution is the design of an actionable guidance that helps practitioners and researchers explore and leverage the transformative potential of social innovations. This guidance emerges from a dialogue between a key framework for analyzing social-ecological transformations and recent advancements in Transformative Social Innovation (TSI) theory. By incorporating insights on adaptive, bottom-linked governance and relational dynamics into the SES processual framework, we strengthen its applicability to TSI analysis and make it more adaptable for real-world contexts. We apply this guidance to a case study in Western Sicily’s aquatic food systems, where a long-standing social innovation – rooted in Living Lab methodologies and collaborative governance – demonstrates the potential to challenge dominant values by reconfiguring dominant social relations, empower local actors, and engage with both deep and shallow leverage points, contributing to systemic transformations. By combining cross-field dialogue with empirical application, this paper offers both practical tools for analyzing and designing transformative social innovation processes and practical insights into how social innovations can contribute to more sustainable, resilient, and equitable futures. It directly speaks to practitioners, scholars, and policy makers interested in enabling systemic transformation through socially embedded innovation processes.
Abstract
In this paper, we propose a fishery control scheme that happens to be first best in the context of a Gordon‐Schaefer model with asymmetric information about effort/harvesting costs. It is widely acknowledged that in the absence of regulations, competition between vessels leads to a competitive game wherein the outcome is inefficient. We introduce a management scheme that regulates the fishing industry through an individual convex tax on effort or on catches. The shares of this tax can be traded in a market, thus solving problems related to asymmetric information. This can be achieved since heterogeneous fishing firms are individually stimulated to solve the same optimality problem as a social planner would. We apply this model to the Northwest Mediterranean demersal fishery as a case study.