Practicing Ecological Citizenship on Urban Farms: Fragmented Care and the Politics of Participation in Lithuania

While the concept of ecological citizenship has been embraced by scholars studying alternative agro-food networks, most of this work tends to focus on consumption and lifestyle politics, often overlooking production as a site... [ view full abstract ]

While the concept of ecological citizenship has been embraced by scholars studying alternative agro-food networks, most of this work tends to focus on consumption and lifestyle politics, often overlooking production as a site for practicing (post)cosmopolitan politics (e.g. Seifang 2006, cf. Lockie 2009, Traveline 2010). The purpose of this paper is to focus on a particular form of agricultural work—urban farming—to examine how farmers negotiate global environmental concerns with specific acts of work and care for the land. Empirically, we examine urban farming initiatives in Vilnius, Lithuania, where urban agriculture is a relatively new practice and has to be negotiated with locally existing self-provisioning schemes. By taking a comparative perspective to track the implementation of the ecological citizenship project global peripheries , this case study reveals tensions and key features defining this form of global environmental politics. Based on ethnographic fieldwork spanning seven months, participant observations, and 18 semi-structured interviews, our research shows that urban farmers are less committed to the plants or land plots than ideas and identities of being global citizens. To conceptualize these practices, we introduce the term of “fragmented care.” By “fragmented,” we build on Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis of modernization to track the shift from material concerns over plants, soil or water to the focus on the efforts to grapple with global issues such as climate change, overconsumption or pollution. More importantly, such care has a different temporal organization, as it no longer relies on routines, but on special occasions and events during which the work is performed. What is lost in the process of such fragmentation of care is the intimacy of relationships tying human and non-human worlds in specific places. On the other hand, the farmers find new ways to care for and embrace their moral commitment to a shared global future. Our paper concludes with a discussion about diverging forms of care in ecological citizenship. We ask: how important intimacy of care for the plants and land is, as we face planetary challenges.