Same, Same but Different? The ‘Right’ Kind of Gardening and the Negotiation of Neoliberal Urban Governance in the Post-socialist City

Pungas, Lilian; Plüschke-Altof, Bianka; Müüripeal, Anni; Sooväli-Sepping, Helen

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-04636-0_7

Cited by 6 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Unlike fashionable community garden projects (a rather ‘Western’ idea of urban agriculture), which are often located in the city centres, advertised for the sake of Green Capital awards and financed by the municipality, FSP takes place in the (semi-) peripheral areas of the country. FSP gardeners experience a threefold ‘peripheralization’ as they are located on the downside of the respective urban–rural, center-peripheral, and east–west divides (Pungas 2017 ; Pungas et al 2022 , p. 137; Sovová and Krylová 2019 ).…”

Section: The Bielefeld Subsistence Approach and Framework To Assess T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With regard to FSP as an agricultural practice, Western scholarship (but also Estonia’s own political elite) fails to recognize the value of FSP as a result of postcolonial prejudices (Pungas et al 2022 ). Yet, at the same time, Estonia promotes the same agricultural bioeconomy policies as the EU, which will—in a neo-colonial way—exacerbate already existing profound global injustices by prioritizing the global expansion of its agricultural produce.…”

Section: The Bielefeld Subsistence Approach and Framework To Assess T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, through the devaluation process, such practices and labor can potentially be appropriated and co-opted by the neoliberal economic system. This can happen with all types of urban agriculture (FSP being just one of them) and can take many forms, as various scholars have shown (Pungas et al 2022 ; McClintock 2014 ). Through “green gentrification” (Gould and Lewis 2016 ), “community capitalism” (Van Dyk 2018 ), and the “sharing economy” (Martin 2016 ), the current economic model has found creative ways of co-opting devalued practices, civic engagement, and neighbourhood initiatives as services and labor provided ‘for free’ by activists, community members, and ‘active citizens’ alike.…”

Section: The Bielefeld Subsistence Approach and Framework To Assess T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Through “green gentrification” (Gould and Lewis 2016 ), “community capitalism” (Van Dyk 2018 ), and the “sharing economy” (Martin 2016 ), the current economic model has found creative ways of co-opting devalued practices, civic engagement, and neighbourhood initiatives as services and labor provided ‘for free’ by activists, community members, and ‘active citizens’ alike. 10 FSP can thus unintentionally become a buffer mechanism to compensate for the shortcomings of the neoliberal governance, and thus end up indirectly maintaining this system (Pungas et al 2022 ).…”

Section: The Bielefeld Subsistence Approach and Framework To Assess T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Invisible (bio)economies: a framework to assess the ‘blind spots’ of dominant bioeconomy models

Pungas

2023

Sustain Sci

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Bioeconomy as a new promissory discourse neither challenges the paradigm of economic growth, nor questions its embeddedness in capitalist (neo-)colonial patriarchal power relations. However, the calls for a ‘genuine’ socio-ecological transformation and for alternative bioeconomy visions imply exactly a destabilization of these power relations. Drawing on the Bielefeld subsistence approach and on its colonialism–capitalism–patriarchy nexus, I argue that the latest bioeconomy strategy and policy papers of both the EU and Estonia each disregard certain spheres of the bioeconomy due to the three-dimensional power relations. As a seemingly neutral political discourse, the bioeconomy is shaped by cultural assumptions and narratives that determine and perpetuate what is deemed worthy of protection and what is pushed aside as merely ‘natural’. As such, the current bioeconomy papers promote a ‘biomass-based model of capital accumulation’ that is essentially built on the prerequisite of the subordination, devaluation, appropriation and/or exploitation of (1) different geographical regions, (2) ecological foundations, and (3) prevalent bioeconomy practices. As a widespread agricultural practice in Eastern Europe, Food Self-Provisioning (FSP) serves as a good example of how predominant bioeconomy models (1) simply operate as new forms of postcolonial development discourse, instead of embracing the plurality of decolonial ‘alternatives to development’; (2) deepen the human–nature dichotomy by regarding nature as a mere resource to be extracted more efficiently instead of cultivating mutually nourishing partnership-like relation(ship)s with nature; and (3) maintain the separation between monetized and maintenance economies, rather than fostering ethics of care to overcome the structural separation between the latter.

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Section: The Bielefeld Subsistence Approach and Framework To Assess T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Bielefeld Subsistence Approach and Framework To Assess T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Bielefeld Subsistence Approach and Framework To Assess T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Bielefeld Subsistence Approach and Framework To Assess T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Invisible (bio)economies: a framework to assess the ‘blind spots’ of dominant bioeconomy models

Pungas

2023

Sustain Sci

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“…Especially the elderly, who constitute the majority of the Ida-Viru population, have seen their knowledge and practices devalued throughout the last decades of neoliberal transformation and nationalist framing. Furthermore, as some scholars have argued, gardeners in this region experience a three-fold "peripheralisation" as they are located on the flip side of the respective urban-rural, center-periphery, and east-west divides (Sovová and Krylová, 2019;Pungas et al, 2022). These tensions have been further exacerbated by the war in Ukraine (ERR, 2022;Henley, 2022;Pungas and Kiss, 2023).…”

Section: Operationalizing Food Democracy At the Dachasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dachas and food democracy—What makes a (good) food citizen?

Pungas

2023

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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Against the backdrop of multiple crises within—and due to—the current industrial agri-food system, food is a highly political issue. As calls for food sovereignty grow louder and the war in Ukraine exposes the fragility of global food systems, the concept of food democracy calls on all (food) citizens to engage in a democratic and collective struggle for socially just and environmentally friendly food systems. To date, “Western” examples of food democracy and formal political procedures of civil society have dominated scholarship, ignoring the self-organized, low-key, and informal political activities around food in the post-socialist East. In this article, we shed light on the aspects of food democracy within Food Self-Provisioning (FSP) practices in Eastern Estonia, which is our case study. Our empirical data is based on semi-structured interviews conducted in 2019–2021 with 27 gardeners on their so-called dachas—a Russian term for a plot of land with a seasonal allotment house used primarily for food production. The analysis focuses on the food-, farming-, and nutrition-related attitudes and practices of the gardeners, as well as the multitude of collective endeavors to improve food systems. Despite the precarious socio-economic and political status of the gardeners, we identified a variety of subtle, informal, and mundane forms of democratic practices and everyday resistance. We investigate the interplay of these aspects along the three dimensions of food democracy (input, throughput, output). On the one hand, FSP on Eastern Estonian dachas encompasses essential characteristics of the mainly “Western” concept of food democracy, allowing access to and participation in agricultural production while preserving (re)productive nature in the future. On the other hand, we caution against excessive optimism and romanticization of such local food communities, as they tend to remain exceptions and risk extinction or displacement if they are not valorized and reshaped through public discourse. We conclude with a plea for building and strengthening alliances between the marginalized elderly rural food producers and the more youthful urban food activists to achieve more democratic, just, and ecologically sound food systems.

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Who stewards whom? A paradox spectrum of human–nature relationships of Estonian dacha gardeners

Pungas

2022

Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research

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Same, Same but Different? The ‘Right’ Kind of Gardening and the Negotiation of Neoliberal Urban Governance in the Post-socialist City

Cited by 6 publications

References 47 publications

Invisible (bio)economies: a framework to assess the ‘blind spots’ of dominant bioeconomy models

Invisible (bio)economies: a framework to assess the ‘blind spots’ of dominant bioeconomy models

Dachas and food democracy—What makes a (good) food citizen?

Who stewards whom? A paradox spectrum of human–nature relationships of Estonian dacha gardeners

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