Green economy, multifunctional agriculture and Corporate Social Responsability Models in peri-urban regeneration processes: an Italian experience for the historical farmhouses system"

Nowadays the strategies of the agricultural and environmental policies (the Lisbon strategy "EU 2020") -in particular the Sixth Environment Action Programme 2010: Our Future, Our Choice- highlight the need to create a market more environmentally friendly and "responsible". The recent debate shows that the "green" variable in financial management is put at the center of the reflections of employers in both the discretionary dimensional (culture, ethics and responsibility) and in the normative-prescriptive dimension. Some positive experiences bring out the following topics: 1) the approaches of multifunctional agriculture in synergy with the themes of the European debate about the Corporate Social Responsibility, 2) the definition of a new business framework, 3) the management model oriented to the stakeholders and to the ethical management. The vision of the entrepreneur green in managing the company is an innovative point of view with respect to the obligations of law and falls within the sphere "responsible" for environmental management. The literature, in fact, focuses on: 1) a responsible model of business management through "stakeholder" model, as opposed to the "shareholder model", where the creation of value is not confined to equity holders of risk, but companies assume the management objectives that bring mutual benefit to the community; 2) the development of specific items in the analysis of financial statements that takes into account aspects of environmental responsability. According to this, the paper aims to analyze the application of principles of the “responsible” management process to an Italian case study: the scenario of enhancement of historical farmhouses system in Volpiano (Canavese in metropolitan area of Turin, Italy). This territory is paradigmatic, as it is characterized by the coexistence the historical rural settlement patterns (partially altered by the construction of roads infrastructure) with new housing and productive settlement systems: it is an issue of great importance not only local. As a first step, the paper aims reviewing the large literature (Carroll, 1991; Freeman et al, 2007) on the subject of Corporate Social Responsibility. It follows a reflection of the strengths and weaknesses of similar operations: the development of structural frameworks of knowledge of rural landscapes and its settlements, the operational aspects of evaluation and feasibility tests with the introduction of environmental items in the traditional economic accounting approach (the green value in the International Standards). The concept of multifunctional agriculture, conceived as agriculture that produces primary goods, on the other as agriculture that produces secondary services. The second step is to elaborate the specific Financial Management Analysis Model for the enhancement of the historical farmhouses, where particular attention was paid to two technical steps: 1) mapping of the stakeholders in accordance with the Corporate Social Responsibility approach; 2) the identification of specific items in the financial statements (in these phase of testing only at the categorial and descriptive level). In fact, the final project scenario was checked with traditional instruments for operational feasibility analysis, foreseeing: the functional recovery and the restoration of the farms, the traditional culture with fodder crops and "new" (hazel) and the creation of spaces for the use of agriculture and animal husbandry as a source of therapy, education and ennobling. Some specific reflections were drawn on the estimate of the investment costs for the restoration and re-functioning, on the timing of site preparation and the management data, and on the identification of financing channels (PSR and the European CAP). Finally, the feasibility conditions are linked to the economic social responsibility and presents elements of originality in the feasibility test performance and the new assumptions on the risk/return ratio.