Publication details
A change engaging resilience: home gardening, food sharing and everyday resistance
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | Resilience and food self-provisioning, two terms traditionally deployed in studies of livelihoods in the context of the Global South, have recently made inroads into alternative food scholarship in the Global North. Drawing on a large-scale survey (2058 respondents) and four focus groups conducted in the Czech Republic in 2015, this paper investigates food self-provisioning as social resilience enhancing set of practices. In addition to the traditional reading of food self-provisioning as a passive, defensive, crisis deflecting form of resilience, the paper puts forward an alternative conceptualisation of resilience as a capacity orthogonal to dominant neoliberal food practices. The paper also aims to break with the research tradition that deems studies conducted in the periphery of the Global North lacking in potential to produce more generally valid insights. It therefore seeks to counter the scripting of Eastern Europe on the margins of the geographies of knowledge production. Non-market food self-provisioning and sharing significantly enhance food security as they diversify the range of food entitlements which are at disposal to a large segment of Czech society. These practices extend the portfolio of food entitlements (Sen 1981) beyond the usual exchange entitlement 140 to include production and transfer entitlements. Importantly, informal food sharing reaches beyond the circles of food growers as food produced by Czech households is also received by households which are not involved in self-provisioning. These practices can be viewed as ‘slow’ micro-scale processes which contribute to the stability of society which was exposed to fast macro-scale and externally induced restructuring. Compared to the emblematic but ‘niche’ and somewhat elitist market-based alternative food networks (Forssell and Lankoski 2015), food self-provisioning has a stronger resilience potential than these alternatives which are often dependent on limited and intermittent resources. While food self-provisioning can provide an effective response to a crisis and can be viewed as the status quo maintaining form of resilience, the paper seeks to demonstrate that it promises more than that. The research shows that food selfprovisioning is sustained by largely positive motivations and hence can also be viewed as a form of resilience which is proactive, preventative, future-oriented and transformation-enabling. |
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