Policies for People and Places – Interreg Event for Knowledge-Sharing
The Interreg Europe event “Policies for People and Places” took place in Amsterdam on the 12th and 13th of November 2025. This event featured three workshops on the themes of enhanced value chains, social economy, and urban renewal and was attended by over 160 policy-makers, researchers, industry representatives and civil society actors from across Europe. Ireland was well-represented by delegates from national, regional, and local government and civil society.
As part of the ORIGINN project, EMRA has helped promote Ireland’s Food Vision 2030 strategy as a good practice in food systems governance across Europe. Ian Fox of the Department of Agriculture, Food, and the Marine was invited to present this strategy in the workshop on enhanced value chains. Participants were impressed by the mission-oriented approach of Food Vision 2030, which seeks to balance economic, social, and environmental sustainability to ensure a robust food system and a nourishing food supply in Ireland. The bottom-up, stakeholder-led approach of the Food Vision strategy also stood out as an excellent way of ensuring inclusivity of stakeholders and ownership of the missions and targets of the strategy by the actors most affected by them.
The workshop participants visited the NoordOogst community-supported agriculture initiative, an urban farm in Amsterdam that is a partner in the FoodCLIC project. FoodCLIC brings together actors from politics, science and civil society to support the development of integrated urban food policies, i.e. policies that facilitate the accessibility and availability of healthy and sustainably produced food for all people and, in particular, for vulnerable communities. The NoordOogst community farm adopts a self-harvesting model in which its 120+ members come and harvest food from the gardens according to their needs. A solidarity payment scheme ensures that members pay what they can afford, with larger contributions making up for smaller ones from those who can’t afford to pay more. Fresh fruit and vegetables are still provided to the members at below-market prices, ensuring fresh, healthy produce for the community at a more affordable rate than a supermarket can offer. The farm also supports local food and drink enterprises based on-site. This model offers food for thought for policy-makers seeking to support a diversified and sustainable food supply through a community-led approach.
Throughout the workshop, presentations on good practices in enhancing value chains in food and energy systems sparked plenty of discussion about the challenges and opportunities of coordinating actors to add value and improve sustainability and resilience. Smart specialisation and clustering are key to this.
This Interreg event brought together expertise and experience from a broad range of actors across Europe, which is a rich resource for EMRA and other regions to draw on as we work to strengthen innovation and resilience for the benefit of the communities of our region.
