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

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.