Analisi economica dell’adozione dei piani di Difesa Integrata Avanzata nella viticoltura del Nord-Est d’Italia

Public policy and societal pressure towards sustainability, together with the need to adapt viticulture to climate change, call for a reassessment of vineyard management strategies. Conventional plant protection, still largely reliant on systematic chemical inputs, shows clear environmental and social limits. Although Integrated Pest Management (IPM) was introduced as an input-reducing framework based on monitoring and targeted interventions, its farm-level translation has often been perceived as unsatisfactory under real vineyard conditions. Recent literature therefore calls for a stronger agroecological orientation of crop protection, yet guidance on how to operationalise this shift remains limited, particularly regarding technical feasibility, economic sustainability, and adoption dynamics. Against this backdrop, the present study analyses the economics of adopting Advancced-IPM plans in viticulture in North-East Italy, assessing socio-economic effects, constraints and enabling levers, and the decision-making processes shaping uptake. Methodologically, the thesis combines qualitative operationalisation with survey-based behavioural modelling and hierarchical decision analysis (AHP). Findings indicate that A-IPM is best understood as a capability transition rather than a technique-based innovation, and can be feasible and economically compatible alongside environmental benefits. Uptake, however, is not readily standardisable: it depends on farms’ capacity for adaptive decision-making and on coherent integration of practices over time. Two barriers are central: developing a systemic understanding of vineyard functioning and revising routines towards monitoring-based interpretation and continuous adjustment across seasons. These results suggest that enabling adoption requires support that strengthens learning and decision capacity while accounting for heterogeneous constraints and priorities across farms. These findings imply that policy should move towards a more result-oriented approach, prioritising enabling support for learning and adaptive decision-making and allowing differentiated pathways that reflect heterogeneous farm constraints and priorities.