Chinese food self-provisioning: key sustainability policy lessons hidden in plain sight

Petr Jehlička (), Huidi Ma (), Tomáš Kostelecký () and Joe Smith ()
Additional contact information
Petr Jehlička: Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences
Huidi Ma: Chinese National Academy of Arts
Tomáš Kostelecký: Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences
Joe Smith: Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

Agriculture and Human Values, 2024, vol. 41, issue 2, No 17, 647-659

Abstract: Abstract Drawing on an exploratory study of urban food self-provisioning (FSP) in China, this article argues that progress in sustainability scholarship can be accelerated by embracing a greater diversity of framings of sustainability. It brings four important empirical findings concerning the prevalence of Chinese urban FSP, the social diversity of its practitioners, their primarily non-economic motivations, and production methods meeting the criteria for organic food that are deployed by more than a third of urban food growers. On this basis, the article highlights the importance of greater attention to identifying and valuing ‘already existing sustainability’ in non-Western contexts, rather than privileging Western conceptualizations of sustainability that promise sustainability innovation in the future.

Keywords: Alternative food networks; China; Food self-provisioning; Innovation; Maintenance; Sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10460-023-10506-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:agrhuv:v:41:y:2024:i:2:d:10.1007_s10460-023-10506-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10460

DOI: 10.1007/s10460-023-10506-7

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture and Human Values is currently edited by Harvey S. James Jr.

More articles in Agriculture and Human Values from Springer, The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().