Petr Jehlička

Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences · Department of Ecological Anthropology

This paper investigates notable examples of sustainable lifestyles in relation to food systems. It explores the surprisingly neglected case of widely practised and environmentally sustainable food self-provisioning in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. Our argument is rooted in qualitative and quantitative data gathered over a seven-year pe...

The article contributes to the debates in geography on the inequality of knowledge production and the context-dependent hierarchy of knowledge claims. It seeks to make sense of the invisibility, to Western academia, of East European informal food provisioning as a research topic with the potential to inform debates and theorisations regarding alter...

Drawing on our long-term research experiences, in this deliberately provocative but also reflexive paper we argue that international food and agriculture studies constitute a research area that would particularly benefit from insights obtained from research conducted in the world's peripheries—in this case, specifically from insights on East Europe...

This study contributes to research proposing the ethics of care framework as a way of imagining a food system that cares for Others. We expand this exploration to the everyday practice of home gardening and the related social relationships and material flows. This area complements current scholarship, which mostly focuses on food-related care as a...

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 pra...

Recent research on food self-provisioning (FSP) has pointed to its material similarity with the practices of alternative food networks (AFNs) – a subject of enormous scholarly interest in the last two decades. Most of the limited research on FSP has so far focused on comparing gardeners with the non-gardening population in a single country and over...

Background COVID-19 impacted people disproportionately and exacerbated preexisting social and health inequalities. The aim of this study was to understand how socioeconomic and health conditions affected food security in Czechia during the pandemic. Methods Data on a representative panel of Czech adults from a longitudinal survey, Life During the...

Sustainable agrifood systems are critical to averting climate-driven social and ecological disasters, overcoming the growth paradigm and redefining the interactions of humanity and nature in the twenty-first century. This Perspective describes an agenda and examples for comprehensive agrifood system redesign according to principles of sufficiency,...

While alternative food networks (AFNs) have become the leading conceptualisation of sustainable food systems, vibrant scholarship on food self‐provisioning (FSP) in Central and Eastern Europe has remained confined to the geopolitical region it investigates. This article brings these two bodies of thought closer together in two steps. First, we trac...

European accounts of home gardening or food self-provisioning (FSP) typically frame these practices as primarily economically motivated and need related, and community gardening or urban agriculture as ethical sustainability strategies. Drawing on primary research on FSP in two East European countries, this paper combines analysis of socio-demograp...

This article adds to the literature interrogating existing hierarchies in global knowledge production by examining the dominant research on post-1989 Central and East European (CEE) environmentalism. Analyses of CEE environmentalism have predominantly relied on concepts and organizational models generated by research on environmental activism and p...

The majority of the world’s smallholders live in countries that experience(d) socialism, but they largely remain invisible in agrarian studies. This special issue puts the spotlight on post-socialist smallholders, asking whether, and how, they (1) fulfil important functions in society; (2) engage in resistance (against the state or corporate actors...

Alternative food networks in post-socialist settings are often studied using concepts and analytical tools developed in the Anglo-American context. As a result, the findings tend to replicate and confirm rather than challenge and extend the extant knowledge and theorisations. Based on a recent study of farmers' markets in the Czech capital Prague,...

Since the early 2000s ‘lopsided’ geographies of knowledge production and context-dependent hierarchies of knowledge claims have been subject to growing critique in Western sociology and other social sciences. Intriguingly, Eastern Europe has been largely left out of these counterhegemonic explorations. Focusing on East European alternative food pra...

Resilience and food self-provisioning (FSP), terms that until recently were deployed primarily in the study of livelihoods in the Global South, are now attracting attention from alternative food scholarship in the Global North. Drawing on a large-scale survey conducted in the Czech Republic, this article investigates FSP as a social resilience-enha...

Polistopadový český environmentalismus je myšlenkově v mnoha směrech kompatibilní s ekologickou modernizací, která je od osmdesátých let určujícím diskurzem o životním prostředí na Západě. Autoři tvrdí a v článku dovozují, že tato kompatibilita není jen výsledkem importu těchto idejí do českého prostředí po roce 1989 a že základy pro přijetí paradi...

Food self-provisioning, also labelled as household food production, is a traditional activity persisting in the countries of the Global North. Recently, it has become an object of sustainability oriented research due to the positive social, health and environmental outcomes. However, little is known about the rate of self-sufficiency of the food se...

There are few research areas for which the depiction of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as a site of ‘incredible melange of practices, rhythms and identities’ where the old and the new combines (Pickles and Smith 2007) is more fitting than for alternative food supply networks. Between one and two-thirds of CEE populations are involved in informal...

Despite the unprecedented attention paid to the sharing economy and despite the growing interest in household food production, the non-market and non-monetised sharing of home-grown food – a social practice at the intersection of these two concerns – has so far largely escaped scholars’ attention. The goal of the article is twofold. First, drawing...

East European food self-provisioning (FSP) has fascinated scholars of post-socialism ever since the early 1990s. In keeping with its predominantly economic and cultural conceptualisations, much of this research has been concerned with FSP’s role in household economy and with the social profile of its practitioners. In contrast to western conceptual...

Between one and two thirds of East European populations grow some of the food consumed in their households. These food practices are significant in terms of food security, healthy diet and environmental sustainability and account for large volumes of household food consumption. These practises nurture social cohesion, resilience and informal food e...

This paper questions assumptions about the relationship between class formation, sustainability and patterns of consumption. The empirical elements of the research are based upon qualitative and quantitative time-series research into food self-provisioning and ‘quiet sustainability’ in post socialist Central and Eastern Europe (Poland and the Czech...

In keeping with the peripheral standing of East European rural spaces in transition studies, in the past twenty five years post-socialist home gardening has received little attention other than as a path-dependent economic strategy of passive and disadvantaged segments of society. The large scale of post-socialist household food production and dist...

‘Europeanisation’ of Central and East European (CEE) agriculture and rural development was based on fairly technocratic ideas of unidirectional know-how and funding transfers and some problematic assumptions and expectations. These included promotion of the existing EU agricultural model with little interest and attention to CEE specific economic c...

Considerable scholarly attention has been given to Charter ’77 as a site of dissent in the former Czechoslovakia. Yet there was a socially embedded site of resistance that was active long before the dissidents. We call this site the Czech woodcraft culture. With its mass popularity and its potent references to Native American anti-colonialism, the...

Food systems are of increasing interest in both research and policy communities. Surveys of post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) show high rates of food self-provisioning. These practices have been explained in terms of being ‘coping strategies of the poor’. Alber and Kohler’s ‘Informal Food Production in the Enlarged Europe...

This paper brings together consideration of food policies and practices and of post-socialist transition to raise neglected questions about means of nurturing more sustainable food systems in the developed world. The last three decades have been marked by the growing salience of food as a political and scholarly concern. While market-based alternat...

Using the case of Movement Brontosaurus, a Czech organization founded in state socialist times, this article investigates how civic associations and nongovernmental organizations seeking to promote alternatives to the status quo respond to institutional pressures in different political and social contexts. The case shows that under state socialism,...

To demonstrate the role of space and time in social movements, the paper analyses the evolution and context of the environmental movement in the Czech and Slovak republics from 1948 to 1998. It shows that the movement's identity was formed under socialism and that political opportunity and resource availability changed markedly over time, as did it...

This study of the politics of food production/consumption in Poland and the Czech Republic brings together food and post-socialist studies. The food stories explored in the paper, relating to packaging, restaurant dining, self-provisioning and the emergence of an organic food sector, open up the politics of everyday life in these significant cases....

It is widely assumed that modern environmentalist thinking was imported into post-communist states such as the Czech Republic post 1989. This paper shows these countries had environmental traditions of their own. From its inception in the late 1950s Czech environmentalism was concerned with nature conservation and youth education. At the core of it...

After the fall of state-socialism, efforts were made to build democracy by creating civil society organizations (CSOs) and forming independent nonprofit sectors across Central and Eastern Europe. However, most of these efforts ignored the mass organizations, state-sponsored interest groups, and quasi-independent associations in existence for many y...

The conventional interpretation of the Czech environmental movement in the political science literature contrasts its role as part of the revolution of 1989, which is seen as a spontaneous and local role, with a period of Westernisation in the 1990s. This paper argues, primarily on the basis of interviews with key movement intellectuals, that this...

This contribution addresses questions regarding the future of European environmental policy after the EU has been enlarged to include a number of Central and Eastern European countries. The existing literature, based mainly on EU-related 'top-down' variables such as status of harmonisation, availability of pre-accession funds, and future Council vo...

Analysts of environmental policy in the former Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe have increasingly recognised the need to interrelate inherited social institutions and new political dynamics. This perspective is developed by examining the transformation of minerals policy in the Czech Republic, focusing on regulation of the aggregates...

The two case studies, representing distinct strands of the Czech environmental movement, challenge contemporary claims that in the age of globalisation the significance of the national context in shaping protest and agency is declining. The specific context of post-communist political reform and economic restructuring is emphasised as a key determi...

Mit dem Abschluss der Beitrittsverhandlungen hat eine neue Phase begonnen. Die Dominanz der EUsollte nun schrittweise einer ausgeglicheneren Beziehung zwischen alten und neuen Mitgliedsstaaten weichen. Wird dies, wie teilweise von westlichen Autoren befürchtet wird, zu einer Abschwächung der europäischen Umwelt- und Nachhaltigkeitspolitik führen? A...

Published without an abstract.

About the book: The social activism that has been so important in the West since the 1960s is also changing the face of Central Europe today. This book examines four major social movements -- women's, religious, environmental, and gay/lesbian -- that have recently surfaced in the region. The first section focuses on the women's movements in eastern...

1. vyd.

Using the case study of the Czech Republic, the article examines the link between the development of environmental policy and the more general social and economic development of a post-communist society. The initially progressive arrangement of environmental agencies and procedures of the early 1990s, which were in tune with the concurrent developm...

Somewhat paradoxically, after the important role that the green issue played in bringing down the old regime, the environment has now slipped off the political agenda in the Czech Republic. Moderate improvement of some environmental indicators has occurred mainly due to the slow‐down in economic activity after 1989. The goals of the government's en...

This paper maps the distribution of membership for three major environmental groups: amenity societies affiliated to the Civic Trust; Friends of the Earth ami the RSNC Wildlife Trusts Partnership, The resulting patterns reveal sharp regional differences in group membership, providing qualified support for the frequently-made assertion that, in the...

Roughly since the beginning of the 1970s, and particularly as a consequence of the 1972 Stockholm Conference, environmental issues have been gradually acquiring prominence, reaching a peak - for the time being - at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The same period also witnessed a growing variety and divergence in approaches towards the...

The Green Party was the first new political party to emerge on the Czechoslovak political scene after the November revolution in 1989. Environmentalist movements dating from before the revolution had a strong influence on the process of the patty's foundation. Its development since the revolution has been marked by a vague political orientation, in...

The paper deals with the appraisal of the space and time suffrage stability of four traditional political parties - the People's Party, the Socialist Party, the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party. The evaluation demonstrates connections between voting patterns in 1920-1946 and the spatial differentiation of 1990 election results.

The Cidlina river is interesting since the area is one of the most extensively cultivated agricultural areas but is far from being an important industrial region. The first part is a short analysis of physical and economic geographical factors influencing the quality of water. The analytical part - based upon two sources of information - is the eva...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Cambridge, 1998.