Farming in the shadow of violent organizations: Understanding farmers’ institutional displacement in the Neapolitan ‘Land of Fires’.

In this paper, we attempt to understand and analyse the role of organized violence as a set of practices emerging in socio-ecological crises and shaping institutional change. Particularly, we focus on how Mafia-like organizations have acted as an institutional actor triggering the emergence of novel institutional logics supporting practices of illegal land-based waste management. These logics have profoundly affected local farmers and farming community, through a process that we define ‘institutional displacement’. Using the ‘Land of Fire’ emergency in the metropolitan area of Naples as empirical context, we further elaborate on evidence provided by previous studies and a set of primary and secondary data. Using a process theoretical approach, we theorize key processes of institutional logic formation and change, leading to farmers’ institutional displacement.