Petr Jehlička (2024) The practice and policy of food self-provisioning, Keynote address at the concluding seminar of the project ‘Skills of Self-Provisioning in Rural Communities’, Tieteiden talo (House of the Sciences and Letters), 26 August 2024, Helsinki, Finland

Drawing on a longitudinal empirical study of food self-provisioning in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as on a recent exploratory study of this practice in China, this keynote address argues that sustainability scholarship and policy would benefit from embracing a greater diversity of sustainability practices. Such inclusivity in reaching social and environmental action may importantly lead us to pay more attention to what can be termed already existing sustainability, rather than privileging innovation. This reduces the burden placed upon promises and plans sketched out in an idealised future and helps societies to scale out effective solutions. However, these everyday sustainable practices are often deemed backward and hence vulnerable to devaluation by public authorities, and the findings point to the risk of their diminishing.

This keynote redirects attention to the policy implications of possible sustainability losses caused by the devaluing of sustainability-compliant existing practices. It is important to recognise that the losses in terms of sustainability outcomes due to the decline of sustainable practices, such as self-provisioning of food, may significantly outweigh the gains brought about by sustainability innovations. This in turn highlights the need to move the endeavour of uncovering new impetuses for the way we think about sustainability policy to places beyond the epistemic Western ‘core’. It casts epistemic peripheries in the global South and global East as sources of original insights on less conventional forms of sustainability.