The Association "Alessandro Bartola” is a non-profit organization founded in Ancona (Italy) in 1995 and is located at the Department of Economics and Social Sciences in Università Politecnica delle Marche (Italy).
It aims to promote and carry out studies, research, scientific and cultural activities concerning agriculture and its interrelationships with food and agricultural system, territory, environment, and development of local communities. Moreover, it gives special attention to the role of regions in the process of European integration.
The Association encourages the debate between institutions and actors of agro-food chains and rural systems in order to collect and interpret research needs.
The Association, through is membership, is present in about 20 Italian Universities and in major national research centres. Members are all the major agricultural cooperative organizations, farms and institutions. Many of them are entrepreneurs, administrators and actors of agricultural and food systems.
Since its foundation, the Association "Alessandro Bartola” has been carrying out wide research activities at an international level, collaborating, in particular, with the European Commission and its research programmes. The Association also has numerous research activities at a national level collaborating with public and private institutions, agricultural organisations, universities and research centres as well as several Regions with which it collaborates in evaluating agricultural policies and the needs of both agricultural and food systems and rural territories.
The Association "Alessandro Bartola” has launched and is managing the project Agriregionieuropa. Agriregionieuropa has a twofold objective: fostering the dialogue between scientific research and territory about agriculture, agro-food systems and rural development; combining the regional dimension with the international one, and the European one in particular. Agriregionieuropa is primarily a scientific review of agricultural economics and policy, freely available on the website www.agriregionieuropa.it.
The Association "Alessandro Bartola” invests substantial human and material resources in publishing scientific work through an articulated editorial plan, which is organized in series. Research series, published by Franco Angeli, collects scientific contributions of national and international importance; PhD Studies and on-line Theses series are aimed at disseminating the best PhD and degree theses, respectively; Applied Economics publishes contributions about applied economics; Papers series publishes more popular works which are of predominantly regional importance; Notes series contains working papers, short notes and useful articles used as reference documents.
Moreover, the Association “Alessandro Bartola” has long undertaken an extensive e-learning activity. The didactic path uses the open source platform Moodle and is founded on a learning system based on the principles of lifelong education. The Association has produced and currently manages several e-learning courses on the Common Agricultural Policy, farm management, agricultural cooperatives and policy evaluation.