Foregrounding invisible foundations: (eco-)feminist perspectives on provisioning systems

Abstract

Debates on provisioning systems have become more widespread in recent years. Most of these discussions, however, have centered on the monetized economy. While they have elaborated on actors and institutions in the monetized economy, they tend to ignore the foundational role of unpaid provisioning processes. This article contributes to provisioning systems scholarship by foregrounding this indispensable yet invisibilized foundation of production, distribution, and consumption. In doing so, we combine different approaches on provisioning systems in social ecology, political ecology, and political economy with chronologically older feminist economics debates on social provisioning to arrive at an ecofeminist political economy conceptualization of social-ecological provisioning. We elaborate on this conceptualization by drawing upon the example of food provisioning, thereby showing that people provision for themselves, their families, and their communities through closely interlinked paid and unpaid provisioning practices. Only by acknowledging the central role of actors and institutions in the non-monetized economy and by taking an intersectional approach to the questions of who provides and who is provided for can a more holistic picture of food provisioning be drawn. In the last part of the article, we discuss ecofeminist strategies that strengthen non-monetized social-ecological provisioning without monetizing it, thereby questioning the arbitrariness of what is (un-/under-)paid in capitalist economies.

Keywords:

• Provisioning systems
• feminist economics
• political ecology
• social provisioning
• ecofeminist political economy
• food

Introduction

Provisioning systems scholarship has seen increased interest in recent years (FEC 2020; LiLi 2022; O’Neill et al. 2018; Plank et al. 2021). A prominent definition conceptualizes provisioning systems as “a set of related elements that work together in the transformation of resources to satisfy a foreseen human need” (Fanning et al. 2020, 3). This needs-based approach has been at the center of another strand of literature on provisioning that is, however, rarely drawn upon in provisioning systems scholarship, namely feminist debates on social provisioning (Berik and Kongar 2021; Power 2004). The major distinction between different approaches to provisioning systems and feminist debates on social provisioning is that the latter takes an intersectional approach to both paid and unpaid, as well as the material and immaterial dimensions of social provisioning processes. In this article, we argue that provisioning systems scholarship has much to learn from (eco-)feminist scholarship on social provisioning. Zooming in on the example of food, we show that both the analysis of and solutions for contemporary problems in capitalist food provisioning are incomplete when non-monetized forms of provisioning and/or an intersectional lens are neglected.

The question guiding this article is “what can provisioning systems scholarship learn from (eco-)feminist perspectives on social-ecological provisioning, and which strategies can help strengthen its non-monetized dimensions?” To answer this question, we first provide a literature review of approaches on provisioning systems in social ecology, political ecology, and political economy, as well as feminist debates on social provisioning. In the third section, we synthesize the central insights of our previous discussion with theories at the intersection of feminisms and the environment to arrive at our ecofeminist political economy conceptualization of social-ecological provisioning. We argue that it is precisely an intersectional analysis of the unpaid part of the economy, including its actors, institutions, and power relations, that should receive more attention in approaches on provisioning systems. We elaborate on the example of food provisioning in the fourth section before discussing strategies to strengthen non-monetized social-ecological provisioning in section five.

Provisioning systems and social provisioning

In the following, we introduce discussions on provisioning systems and social provisioning, discuss their respective strengths, and outline how a combination of these theoretical approaches can benefit a more holistic and nuanced analysis of society-nature relations. We draw upon ideas from the provisioning systems approaches and identify four main shortcomings based on our ecofeminist political economy conceptualization of social-ecological provisioning.

Recent debates on provisioning systems

Recent discussions on provisioning systems have had several implications. First, they have contributed to linking discussions on alternative resource use to the question of needs (O’Neill et al. 2018; see the project Living Well Within Limits¹). This shifted the debate in social-ecological research from questions of efficiency to the question of why we must use resources in the first place (Plank et al. 2021) and how this connects to individual and societal well-being. Whereas a hedonic, subjective well-being often increases consumption, forms of eudemonic well-being center on basic needs as “universal and independent of cultural context” (Millward-Hopkins et al. 2020; see also Bärnthaler and Gough 2023 in this special issue). How these basic needs are satisfied is context-dependent and must be explored together with stakeholders in a participatory manner (Brand-Correa and Steinberger 2017). However, how such a participatory process could counteract on mechanisms of exclusion that hinder marginalized people (e.g., people with unpaid care responsibilities who might not have time to participate, people with disabilities who often encounter physical barriers) from participation has not yet been elaborated on sufficiently (Kern 2021; Milner and Kelly 2009).

Second, provisioning systems highlight what resources are used for and who benefits from their services by emphasizing the role of actors, institutions, and power relations (Fine and Leopold 1993; Plank et al. 2021; Schaffartzik et al. 2021). In the tradition of the Frankfurt School of Social Ecology, Diana Hummel and colleagues (2017, 9) define provisioning as “any benefit societies draw from natural resources.” However, benefits are contested, and not all services are beneficial for all actors within society. How benefits are defined crucially depends upon the actors who define them and is often linked to a certain belief system, habitus, or societal role, as well as to questions of ownership, regulations, and (access to) technology (Plank et al. 2021). Intersectional analysis has been largely lacking in this context (apart from a discussion of gender inequalities in Hummel et al. 2004) but would be well suited to foreground the questions of power that underly the deeply normative question: beneficial for whom, defined by whom, and whose perspective is (not) included?

Third, the focus on provisioning systems allows the connection of biophysical measurement with the social and institutional dimension via interdisciplinary work (Liehr et al. 2017; Mehring et al. 2017; Plank et al. 2021; Schaffartzik et al. 2021). This linking can occur, for instance, by connecting biophysical resource use and social outcomes (LiLi 2022) or by analyzing the transformation of the stock-flow-service nexus (Plank et al. 2021). Whereas the first approach recognizes the role of power, culture, and regulations in how goods and services are produced, distributed, and consumed (Bayliss et al. 2021; Fine et al. 2018), the second conceptualizes and studies social-ecological systems in their material and cultural-symbolic dimensions in the tradition of societal relations with nature (Liehr et al. 2017; Mehring et al. 2017). To date, both approaches have focused almost exclusively on provisioning processes in the monetized sphere, thereby neglecting the non-monetized side of provisioning.

Fourth, provisioning systems have not only added political economic grounding to questions of resource use (Bayliss et al. 2021) but also critically reflected upon the normative foundations of economics. A discussion of what the economy should provide has emerged in research on the foundational economy (Bentham et al. 2013; FEC 2018), primarily concerning (re-)establishing an economy that provides basic goods and services collectively (see, for example, the work in the Foundational Economy Collective or FEC). It focuses on public policy and differentiates between different economics zones – that is, the core economy, the foundational economy, the overlooked economy, and the competitive economy (FEC 2020) – with the foundational economy as the core interest. The “core economy of family and community” (FEC 2020, 3), exemplified by parenting, is conceptualized as non-economic (FEC 2020, 4). Like most of the discussions outlined above, foundational economy scholarship largely bypasses feminist debates on care work and social provisioning (Russell et al. 2022, for an exception, see Bärnthaler et al. 2021). An analysis of the gendered nature of the core economy, a discussion of the intersectional inequalities that occur when unpaid care work is outsourced from the “core economy” to paid care workers – often precariously employed female migrant-care workers – and the acknowledgment that the core economy is foundational for any production process in other economic zones are thus largely lacking.

Feminist debates on social provisioning

Debates on social provisioning precede those on provisioning systems, with the conceptual groundwork stemming from institutional economics (e.g., Gruchy 1987), political economy (e.g., Dugger 1996), ecological economics (e.g., Boulding 1986), and feminist economics (e.g., Nelson 1993), among others. In contrast to neoclassical definitions that regard economics as the study of the allocation of scarce resources, these heterodox economic definitions circle around economics as the study of provisioning goods and services to fulfill societal needs (Jo and Todorova 2018). Groundwork on social provisioning has been done in feminist economics, with social provisioning defined as closely interlinked paid and unpaid activities, as well as material and immaterial social processes that are necessary to sustain human life. The main difference between provisioning systems and social provisioning is that while the former focuses exclusively on the monetized economy, waged work, and material provisioning, the latter foregrounds the non-monetized spheres of the economy, unpaid care work, and immaterial forms of social provisioning – thus offering a more holistic perspective on provisioning processes than provisioning systems scholarship.

Marilyn Power’s 2004 article “Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics” was a key contribution to both feminist economics and research on social provisioning. Her social provisioning approach (SPA), which serves as a methodological starting point for all 50 chapters of the Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics (Berik and Kongar 2021), entails five core assumptions:

1. Care work, both paid and unpaid, constitutes the foundation of every economy. This assumption translates to a shift from isolated individuals and methodological individualism to interconnected actors and an understanding of “economic activities as interdependent social processes” (Power 2004, 6).

2. With human and planetary well-being as a central measure of economic success, the SPA follows a needs-based approach to economics.

3. The SPA is crucially aware of not only unequal power structures but also the power of human agency to transform those structures.

4. Ethical judgments are an invaluable part of economic analysis.

5. Finally, the SPA calls for an intersectional approach to economics “in which the interactions of race, gender, and other historically specific social categories can be better understood” (Power 2004, 6).

Linking these five methodological starting points back to the literature review on provisioning systems in the previous section reveals resemblances and overlaps. Regarding (2), provisioning systems scholarship also aims to respond to human needs, with a focus on human well-being. The role of power relations, as discussed in (3), has been addressed in provisioning systems literature, for example, regarding power asymmetries in supply chains or different economic zones. Relating to (4), ethical judgments and values have been included in provisioning systems debates, for example, when addressing the normative goal of a social-ecological transformation. Hence, while the second, third, and fourth starting points are at least partially reflected in provisioning systems scholarship, a focus on both (1) paid and unpaid care work as foundational and (5) an integrally intersectional approach is largely lacking.

A core contribution of feminist debates on social provisioning to provisioning systems scholarship is to broaden the focus of provisioning to also include the realm of non-monetized provisioning processes. Social provisioning consists “of those daily activities performed to ensure the survival and well-being of oneself and others” (Neysmith et al. 2012, 4) and hence not only includes material and monetized provisioning but simultaneously covers “all aspects of human needs including nurturing and emotional support – much of which still remains in the home and the community” (Mellor 2009, 252). Provisioning processes are highly interlinked and interdependent paid and unpaid economic activities – with market, public, household, community, and subsistence provisioning co-existing as modes of organizing livelihoods (Berik and Kongar 2021; Mellor 2009; Power 2004; Todorova 2015). As Lourdes Benería, Günseli Berik, and Maria Floro (2016, 62) emphasize, “[B]y identifying the economy as the domain of interdependent provisioning activities, feminist economics thus transcends the monetary–non-monetary dichotomy.” The SPA in feminist economics thus challenges foundational economy scholars’ framing of the core economy as non-economic, emphasizing that non-monetized social provisioning is an integral part of the oikos. Unpaid care work in the core economy socially reproduces human livelihood and – as a cross-cutting, rather than separate, zone – constitutes the foundation and infrastructure of all other economic zones, as nothing could be produced in the monetized economy from 9 am to 5 pm without the unpaid work of social reproduction occurring from 5 pm to 9 am.

The second point that feminist debates on social provisioning bring to the table is the importance of intersectional analysis. Intersectionality is a traveling concept rooted in Black feminism, which can be traced back to early interventions such as Sojourner Truth’s 1851 “Ain’t I a Woman” speech and foundational work by the Combahee River Collective (1977). Members of the latter state: “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” This integrated analysis of intersecting axes of oppression was termed “intersectionality” by lawyer and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989). As critical theory and critical praxis (Collins and Bilge 2020), an intersectional approach to debates on social provisioning leads to a more nuanced and holistic analysis of who provides and thus foregrounds actors and institutions in the analysis of provisioning systems. As the gaps in the literature outlined above highlight, an intersectional analysis requires a consideration of not only gender but also, for example, class, race, and (dis)ability.

Returning to the example of the core economy as conceptualized by foundational economy scholars, an intersectional approach that foregrounds unpaid care work leads, as a first step, to the insight that those who provide in the non-monetized core economy have been to this day predominantly women (ILO 2018); in other words, social provisioning is highly gendered (Knobloch 2019). Agentic choice cannot explain the gendered division of labor, but instead, a structural explanation is required: gender – especially if coupled with other variables such as employment type or race – largely shapes who conducts a “second shift” (Hochschild 1989) of unpaid care work in the household and a “third shift” (Gerstel 2000) of unpaid care work outside the household (e.g., community work, care for extended families and friends). A variety of institutions that do not integrally consider gender injustices reproduce and ultimately uphold the gendered division of labor. If, for example, parental leave policies are income-dependent rather than framed as universal and nontransferable rights, the gender pay gap reproduces a gendered distribution of unpaid care work rather than favoring a gender-equal distribution of parental leave (Elson 2017).

However, an intersectional analysis ventures beyond the focus on gender and further leads us to explore the intersectional inequalities associated with certain modes of provisioning. For example, when invisibilized and devalued unpaid care work in the core economy is outsourced to paid care workers, as in the case of precariously employed 24-hour nurses from Poland in Germany (Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2012) or nannies from the Philippines in the United States (Hochschild and Ehrenreich 2004), this reproduces intersectional inequalities along the race-class-gender nexus. An intersectional perspective on social provisioning hence begins with a variety of social (e.g., gendered, racial) injustices and calls for an “[e]conomics as if people at the bottom mattered” (Banks 2021, 123). Despite the difficulty of capturing the myriad forms that intersectional injustices take, it is – as Kathy Davies (2008, 79) argues – precisely the ambiguousness and open-endedness of intersectionality that have made it one of the most crucial concepts in contemporary feminist scholarship, because it “stimulates our creativity in looking for new and often unorthodox ways of doing feminist analysis.”

An ecofeminist political economy conceptualization of social-ecological provisioning

When taking recent debates on provisioning systems as a starting point and considering their common denominator, simply put, they all include the interrelation between resources, the political economy, and needs. How biophysical inputs and social outcomes are quantified and measured differs, but most approaches presuppose the (political) economy as the monetized sphere. Social-ecological provisioning systems have enabled us to examine the processes behind cultivation, harvest, distribution, consumption, and waste (see, for example, the socio-metabolic corridor in Schaffartzik et al. 2021). They have also allowed an acknowledgment and analysis of the power relations that shape processes of provisioning (see Fine et al. 2018; Plank et al. 2021; Russell et al. 2022; Schaffartzik et al. 2021). Yet, these analyses have covered almost exclusively the monetized parts of these processes, which provides an incomplete picture of provisioning processes for two reasons: (1) these images omit the unpaid (and thereby have only a limited understanding of the underpaid) part of the economy, and (2) the analysis of power relations in a political economic sense has so far focused (if at all) on class relations to the exclusion of other categories of discrimination, such as gender, race, (dis)ability, and/or age, as well as the specific forms of discrimination that emerge at the intersection of these categories.

In our conceptualization (see Figure 1), we build on provisioning systems scholarship (the main keywords of which are italicized) and argue along the lines of Marilyn Power’s SPA that it is precisely the unpaid and underpaid parts of the economy, including the intersectional analysis of its actors, institutions, and power relations, that should receive more attention in debates on provisioning systems. More concretely, we build our analysis upon scholarship at the intersection of feminisms and the environment, such as feminist ecological economics and feminist political ecology (for an overview, see Dengler and Strunk 2022), which deploy an ecofeminist political economy perspective that very much resembles the starting points of the SPA in feminist economics. An ecofeminist political economy perspective problematizes that what we commonly regard as “the economy” is only the monetized economy (i.e., what is counted – or countable – in terms of gross domestic product). It emphasizes that this monetized economy, referred to by Maria Mies (1986) as the “tip of the iceberg,” is only a very small part of a much broader, sustaining whole (Mellor 2009). Under the surface lies a diverse set of non-monetized (and/or non-monetizable) social relations and strata, such as unpaid care work and ecosystem functions. While social-ecological provisioning is not restricted to the non-monetized economy, it is indispensable to foreground the non-monetized “economy of socio-ecological provisioning” (Dengler and Lang 2022, 7) as an often structurally invisibilized social and ecological foundation necessary for every production process in the monetized economy.

Figure 1. Ecofeminist political economy perspectives on social-ecological provisioning.

The monetized and non-monetized economy of social-ecological provisioning are separated by a boundary running along the lines of monetization (Dengler and Strunk 2018). Rather than a static line, this boundary is subject to what Nancy Fraser (2017) calls boundary struggles, that is, power-laden contestations about the value of provisioning processes that show the arbitrariness of what is (un-/under-)paid in our current economic system. For example, work in households and communities is typically unpaid, while paid work in the healthcare sector is commonly underpaid. This monetary devaluation stands in sharp contrast to the (during the COVID-19 pandemic, very visible) fact that societies collapse if this care is not or cannot be provided. The economic non-esteem of activities that are crucial for life is systematically linked to paid work. While household production, according to Mies (1986, 110), is one of the “internal colonies” that are constantly tapped but simultaneously invisibilized by the capitalist mode of production, the “housewifization” of wage labor (von Werlhof 1988), in other words the devaluation of paid care work due to its association with women’s unpaid household labor, transfers this disdain for everything connected to unpaid and highly gendered care work to the paid sphere and contributes to the systematic underpayment of paid care work. The fact that care work follows a logic of time spending (i.e., quality care requires time, which can hardly be rationalized) rather than time saving (i.e., efficiency gains) further contributes to the devaluation of paid care work in an economic system that prioritizes economic growth (Himmelweit 2006). Against the background of the housewifization of wage labor, we do not see the boundary between the monetized sphere of production and the non-monetized sphere of reproduction as a static line. Instead, we focus on the gray zones, in-betweens, and boundary struggles and conceptualize the boundary between the monetized economy and the economy of social-ecological provisioning as an active and ongoing process of valorization and devalorization. The current trend in capitalism is to push the boundary down by, for example, monetizing formerly non-monetized activities and – in doing so – to further strengthen the invisibilization and devaluation of non-monetized activities.

To arrive at a fuller picture of social provisioning and provisioning systems, social provisioning must be defined “as an amalgamation of social processes within a broader culture-nature life process” (Todorova 2015, 391). As such, social provisioning necessarily also includes an ecological dimension, as it is embedded in (and limited by) the larger sphere of the natural environment and biophysical surroundings (Spash and Guisan 2021). We have demonstrated that provisioning systems scholarship begins from this ecological dimension but simultaneously falls short by focusing only on the monetized sphere of the economy and lacking an intersectional approach. At the same time, the SPA in feminist economics – despite Marilyn Power herself having elaborated on the field of feminist ecological economics as an “illustrative example of the use of social provisioning as a feminist political economic methodology” (Power 2004, 7) – is often applied without reference to ecological considerations (e.g., many chapters in Berik and Kongar 2021). A redefinition of social provisioning as social-ecological provisioning – or as social provisioning that, “as a fundamentally ecological concept” (Power 2004, 13), integrally considers the embeddedness of social and economic systems in the biosphere – can help overcome the respective shortcomings.

An economy that takes social-ecological provisioning as its starting point would “start from the embodiment and embeddedness of human lives, from the life of the body and the ecosystem, from women’s [unpaid] work and the vitality of the natural world” (Mellor 2009, 264) and emphasize economics as the “study of plural historical, actual and potential economies with their underlying institutional arrangements and biophysical basis rather than a singular abstract idealized ‘economy’” (Spash and Guisan 2021, 214). Our conceptualization of social-ecological provisioning begins with the crucial role of the non-monetized sphere of provisioning systems scholarship but simultaneously relates it to the monetized, attempting to draw holistic pictures of provisioning processes, as well as overcoming the boundary between production and reproduction. Biesecker and Hofmeister’s (2010, 1707) mediation category of (re)productivity, which refers to “the complex interplay, and interdependence, of productive processes in social and ecological space, and…is thus a category of mediation, of bridging between the reproductive and productive, between nature and society,” is a helpful proxy for this endeavor.

As shown at the bottom of Figure 1, we deem a focus on actors, institutions, power relations, and intersectionality necessary to analyze social-ecological provisioning and ask questions such as: (1) “Who provides and who is provided for?” (2) “What needs are seen, and which of those are satisfied by what kind of actors and institutions?” and (3) “How does (the quality of) provisioning depend on race, gender, (dis)ability, class, or sexual orientation?” As argued above, this intersectional perspective is underdeveloped in provisioning systems scholarship, but feminist economists such as Nina Banks (2021, 123) also emphasize that a truly intersectional feminist economics remains an unfulfilled research desideratum. For example, the community, which has long been a central site of reproduction for Black women (Banks 2020) or queer communities (Shiu, Muraco, and Fredriksen-Goldsen 2016), is structurally invisibilized in feminist economics, which often equates unpaid care work with the sphere of the household (mostly conceptualized as heterosexual couples and nuclear families). Against this background, this article also aims to contribute to feminist ecological economics scholarship using an intersectional ecofeminist economy perspective on social-ecological provisioning and to apply it to the topic of food-provisioning systems.

Food provisioning from an ecofeminist political economy perspective

We now illustrate our conceptualization of social-ecological provisioning with examples of food provisioning. We focus on food because food is a basic human need. Yet, in its dominant capitalist forms, food provisioning causes major social inequalities and deepens the ecological crisis (Plank 2022). To date, provisioning systems literature focusing on food provisioning is largely missing (for an exception, see Hummel et al. 2004). In this section, we provide cursory examples to demonstrate why an ecofeminist political economy perspective that foregrounds non-monetized provisioning processes and intersectional injustices is fruitful and highlight actors, institutions, and power relations in these processes. We acknowledge that a truly intersectional analysis requires considering the specific local context and power relations to understand the specific needs of communities (Davis 2008). Such a case-study approach, which is, for example, often deployed in feminist political ecology, is beyond the scope of this article. Instead of a comprehensive case study, this section aims to conceptually illustrate first entry points for an empirical analysis that deploys an ecofeminist political economy perspective on social-ecological provisioning by drawing on existing literature on the political ecology of food.

As outlined in our conceptual framework, we enter the analysis by focusing on the non-monetized sphere – but also the gray zones between paid and unpaid food provisioning – thereby transgressing what Elisabeth Skarðhamar Olsen and Rebecca Whittle (2018, 62) call a problematic “foodscape binary” between capitalist/global/monetized and alternative/local/non-monetized food systems. Crucially, we do not aim to grant visibility to the non-monetized food system by monetizing or commodifying it. Rather, we focus on how these decommodified spaces foster agency and have the potential to promote a social-ecological transformation. Our way of choosing un- and underpaid forms of food provisioning parallels an understanding of food sovereignty as a normative ethical judgment aiming for a democratic control of production, distribution, and consumption (Patel 2009). Being well aware that unpaid labor is often exploitative for women (Little 1997), our aim is not to idealize these spaces but to take them as illustrative examples demonstrating that social-ecological provisioning occurs on a large scale in the non-monetized economy.

Peasants and subsistence farms in the sphere of non-monetized food provisioning nourish the majority of people worldwide, drawing on agroecological practices that have been feeding humanity for thousands of years (McCune and Rosset 2021; Shiva 2016). These practices stay within planetary boundaries and offer a more sustainable way of farming using smaller volumes of pesticides and herbicides, which results in a smaller material footprint than in energy-intensive production (Gliessman 2015). In Ukraine, for example, potato production or the labor-intensive production of vegetables and fruits have not been conducted by agroholdings, which produce cash crops for export, but by households, which are invisibilized as providers and lack political-institutional support (Plank 2017). This division between smallholders serving the needs of the community and large-scale producers serving the needs of the global market also holds true for agrarian extractivist countries in the global South such as Argentina, a global leader in soy exports (Dorn et al. 2022). While a link between ecofeminist practices of caring, nourishing, and guarding biodiversity and agroecology is often assumed, the farms themselves often reproduce intersectional inequalities, as women often do not have access to land and/or are not granted ownership of the fields they cultivate (Agarwal 1988; Morales 2021). Bina Agarwal (1992; Agarwal et al. 2021) shows that we can only understand Indian food provisioning if we analyze gender in relation to class, caste, and age. For the dimension of age, she emphasizes that daughters are more disadvantaged than widows when it comes to inherited land rights. Moreover, the rapid incorporation of subsistence farming in the global South into the international capitalist food market triggers intersectional inequality. Along these lines, the subordination of non-commodified food provisioning to the market is a problem, since it fosters migration to cities and/or foreign countries (Corrado et al. 2018). Access to land, crucial for agroecological practices, is thus promoted by rural feminist social movements such as the Rural Women’s Assembly in Southern Africa (Andrews 2019).

Another example of non-monetized food provisioning systems are food self-provisioning practices (Pungas 2023). In the European context, these are most widespread in Central and Eastern Europe, mainly encompass gardening for vegetables and fruits, and have long been considered “backwards,” “poor,” and “underdeveloped” (Ančić et al. 2019; Daněk et al. 2022; Pungas 2021, 2023; Smith and Jehlička 2013). In Eastern Estonia, for example, the dachas have been treated as remnants of a socialist past, a necessary coping strategy to feed the nation due to food shortages (Pungas 2021). Smith and Jehlička (2013) conducted empirical research in Czechia and Poland showing that the primary motives for engaging in gardening are not food shortages (as in socialist times) but pleasure, recreation, and sharing with friends and family (Smith and Jehlička 2013). They have dubbed food self-provisioning activities to be a form of “quiet sustainability” because in contrast to trending discourses on, for instance, “urban gardening” in Western Europe, the actors engaged in them do not explicitly call them sustainable activities. Their contribution to social-ecological transformation is structurally invisible in sustainability discourses, although they are socially inclusive (e.g., they cover roughly one-third of the population in Czechia, cf. Smith and Jehlička 2013) and linked to care (Sovová et al. 2021). For the Estonian dachas, Pungas (2021, 69) emphasizes the gardeners’ “desires and commitments to care for and to steward the environment, the community and oneself.”

An example of gray zones between paid and unpaid activities more common in North America and Western Europe are alternative food networks including, for example, food cooperatives, urban gardening initiatives, or community-supported agriculture (CSA) (Zoll et al. 2021). In contrast to traditional and relatively inaccessible forms of agriculture such as family farms, CSAs allow newcomers to engage in agriculture. Christina Plank and colleagues (2020) have termed these “values-based modes of production and consumption” because they rely on various mechanisms of solidarity between their members. CSAs can serve as an experimental field to transform society and foster the (re-)creation of care, mutual help, and solidarity among people engaging in collective food-provisioning processes (European CSA Research Group 2016). Often, CSAs are too small to receive political-institutional support in the form of subsidies (e.g., payments per hectare from the European Union). As alternative food networks rely on voluntary work, time, capacities, and resources, they make participation very demanding for people who must devote 40 hours per week to wage work to make a living, especially if these people also have care responsibilities. In Austria, for example, active CSA members often belong to the urban middle class (Plank et al. 2020), and local food networks in Toronto have been said to provide “white food” for mostly white, middle-class women (Franke and Wember 2019). However, rather than being an asset for the privileged, forms of collective provisioning – and this also holds true for food provisioning – have been and continue to be a mode of organizing livelihoods in marginalized communities (Banks 2020) and/or in situations of crisis (Varvarousis and Kallis 2017).

Our final example highlights the relationship between unpaid and underpaid work. Today’s agricultural system relies heavily on invisible workers. Running a family farm requires a labor force, including family members and land or harvest workers. Yet, primarily men act as operating managers and hence the primary wage earners in the farm (Behr 2013; Oedl-Wieser 2015), with the unpaid work of women remaining mostly invisible. Public awareness of the importance of underpaid migrant-harvest workers rose due to the pandemic, when many harvest workers could not leave their countries of origin to work the fields in Western Europe. The situation intensified with the war in Ukraine, since many male harvest workers were not allowed to leave the country (Kleine Zeitung 2022). Due to housewifization (von Werlhof 1988), harvest workers have been devalued by employers claiming that they need not have any noteworthy qualifications. However, people who were recruited to replace migrant-harvest workers during the pandemic were seemingly not adequately qualified to conduct this work. This underlines the crucial position of migrant-harvest workers for the functioning of capitalist food provisioning (Szelewa and Polakowski 2022). These land workers are often not only underpaid and live under precarious circumstances but also create a provisioning gap in their respective home country, where they leave their social structures (and care work/family) behind (Andrzejewska and Rye 2012). Initiatives where migrant-harvest workers began to self-organize, for example the Sindicato Obreros del Campo (Rural Workers Union) in Spain (Reigada 2021) or the Sezonieri (Seasonal Workers) campaign in Austria,² fight for visibility, social recognition, dignified working conditions, and fair wages for those who ultimately uphold societal food provisioning.

This section has provided examples from the sphere of production of food-provisioning systems and discussed social-ecological provisioning, with a focus on unpaid and underpaid spheres as entry points for an intersectional analysis. However, the analogy also holds true for the spheres of distribution and consumption. For example, precarious delivery jobs have gained visibility due to their increasingly important role in sustaining household structures (Srinivas 2021). Moreover, in the United States, people of color working in food distribution have long earned less than whites (Yen Liu and Apollon 2011), while retail work, crucial distributors in the current food system, was termed critical infrastructure during the pandemic (Stevano et al. 2021). Although the work has received some verbal recognition, working conditions have not changed substantially, and workers remain underpaid and in (perhaps even more) precarious working conditions (Franck and Prapha 2021). However, as nurses reiterated regarding the healthcare sector during the pandemic – and this equally holds for precarious jobs in food provisioning – applause does not pay bills; visibility and verbal recognition are insufficient.

Ecofeminist political economy strategies to strengthen non-monetized social-ecological provisioning

While social-ecological provisioning is not restricted to the non-monetized economy, we argue that it is precisely non-monetized social-ecological provisioning (and its relationship to underpaid work) that is commonly overlooked in provisioning systems scholarship. From an ecofeminist political economy perspective, the strategy of “making the hidden visible” (Jochimsen and Knobloch 1997) by monetizing it shifts the boundary rather than dissolves it, causes new problems (e.g., paid care work is notoriously underpaid), and strengthens hierarchies between monetized and non-monetized. The shifting strategy provides an economistic (pseudo-)solution to a much more fundamental and deeply normative question, namely how societies provide for needs and can flourish within planetary boundaries. The alternative to monetization strategies is to strengthen non-monetized social-ecological provisioning. Ulrike Knobloch (2019, 263) develops the idea of “provisioning sovereignty” along the lines of the concept of food sovereignty as a goal of economic activity where all people can provide for themselves or are being provided by public entitlement.

Taking provisioning sovereignty as the normative horizon of social-ecological provisioning begs the question of how to strengthen non-monetized social-ecological provisioning without monetizing (all of) it. We argue that what is needed is a thorough social recognition of the invaluable contribution of underpaid and unpaid forms of social-ecological provisioning and how they contribute to a good life for all. This translates into the double strategy of (1) higher wages and better working conditions for already (under-)paid forms of provisioning work (i.e., elevating underpaid work in Figure 1), while simultaneously (2) strengthening non-monetized social-ecological provisioning without monetizing evermore of the still unpaid provisioning processes (i.e., tackling the boundary and hence deep structure of separation underlying the production/reproduction divide rather than merely shifting non-monetized social-ecological provisioning processes to the paid sector). In this section, we focus on the second of these two issues and illustrate how strategies that change time regimes and wage relations can contribute to the social recognition of non-monetized social-ecological provisioning.

First, as discussed for the example of non-monetized forms of collective food provisioning (e.g., food cooperatives, CSAs, urban gardening), time politics are a crucial (dis-)enabler for participating in all forms of socially necessary and/or desirable unpaid work, such as unpaid care work, subsistence work, or political activism. Considering both paid and unpaid work, time-use surveys provide key insights into how gendered time use is while also noting crucial differences regarding race or class (Connelly and Kongar 2017). Reducing the supremacy of wage work (e.g., 40 hours per week spent in wage work as a societal norm; only wage work is “real work”) at the tip of the iceberg creates time for all other forms of unpaid work and non-monetized activities to flourish. Empirical evidence exists in sustainability literature that time poverty promotes resource-intensive lifestyles and that an unharried pace creates time for more sustainable behavior, for instance, regarding mobility decisions (e.g., Druckman et al. 2012; Knight et al. 2013). Against this background, Winker (2021) sees a reduction of hours spent in wage work as a key leverage point for social-ecological transformation.

Rather than part-time work for some (currently, mostly women, and more generally, those who can afford it), however, the aim should be a general reduction in hours spent in wage work (e.g., Antal et al. 2021; Hanbury et al. 2023). Crucially, from an intersectional perspective, ostensibly gender-neutral policies have gendered effects. For example, as most unpaid care work – similarly to food provisioning – occurs daily (rather than weekly), a reduction in wage work per day, rather than a four-day work week (which is often preferred by individuals, cf. Mullens and Glorieux 2024), is arguably more feminist and not necessarily less ecological (Dengler and Strunk 2018). While a general reduction in wage work does free up time and thus opens conceptual space for engaging in unpaid work, this is by no means an automatic outcome. Time politics must thus venture beyond a reduction of wage work and instead strive for a just distribution of all socially necessary and desirable work – such as implied in Frigga Haug’s 4-in-1 perspective, which entails four hours each day for wage labor, care work, political activities, and leisure (Haug 2008).

Second, and closely linked to the first point, is the question of securing livelihoods. For non-monetized social-ecological provisioning to flourish, the ability to meet basic needs must be separated from wage(d) work. A general reduction of hours spent in wage work can only be socially just if combined with full wage compensation for low-wage earners and – more generally – a discussion on fair minimum (and also maximum) wages. Instead of monetizing evermore unpaid work to make it visible, modes of decoupling livelihood security from wage work are central for ecofeminist political economy strategies to strengthen non-monetized social-ecological provisioning. A universal basic income (UBI) that provides a periodic cash grant to all and thus makes people less dependent on wage work has often been considered as a means toward this end (Torry 2019). More recent discussions on universal basic services (UBS) offer important leverage points to promote collective provisioning for shared needs such as shelter, healthcare, education, and/or public transport (Coote and Percy 2020). In offering a social wage, UBS has a strong redistributive element that has recently been discussed in sustainability literature, for example, as a policy promoting sustainable consumption corridors and enabling social-ecological transformation (Büchs 2021; Coote 2021; Vogel et al. 2024). Combining the two strategies of changing time regimes and wage relations, Bärnthaler and Dengler (2023) suggest time politics, UBS, and a guaranteed individual income lower than UBI (as important basic needs are satisfied collectively) as a transformative policy mix that decouples wage labor from human flourishing.

A third strategy, linked to the examples cited in the prior section, is to amplify unheard voices in decision-making processes. One important element is to gain knowledge about the community, through local individual or group engagement (Little 1997). Social movements such as La Via Campesina, the Rural Women’s Assembly, and the Food Chain Workers Alliance,³ however, are crucial in developing political strategies to gain seats at the negotiating table (Andrews 2019; Plank 2022). Fora for these tables can be diverse and at multiple scales, from local to international, strengthening the food-sovereignty agenda as the right to food (Ruelle and Claeys 2016).

How to arrive at a power shift toward social relations that promote ecofeminist political economy strategies to strengthen non-monetized social-ecological provisioning is an ongoing and necessary debate. While the goal of provisioning sovereignty for human and more-than-human flourishing should be the utopian horizon of the abovementioned strategies, small steps that prefigure these horizons in lived alternatives (e.g., CSAs, solidarity clinics) and/or work toward them by advocating for change in existing institutions (e.g., policy proposals such as UBS or the 4-in-1 perspective) are instructive here. Different actors and institutions can support or hinder what is valued in what kind of way or how politics of time are enacted, and broad alliances are necessary for these boundary struggles to be successful. The logics of transformation connected to these boundary struggles do not exhaust themselves in the top-down vs. bottom-up dichotomy but require bottom-linked approaches (Oosterlynck et al. 2019) at myriad levels that ask what is needed for social-ecological provisioning to flourish.

Conclusion

In this article, we have outlined an ecofeminist political economy perspective on social-ecological provisioning, sketched the major characteristics of recent debates on provisioning systems, and linked them to older feminist debates on social provisioning. The commonalities of these debates are the focus on needs, power relations, and certain ethical guidelines. With regard to the question of what provisioning systems scholarship can learn from (eco-)feminist perspectives on social-ecological provisioning, we have emphasized the role of non-monetized social-ecological provisioning and the need for an intersectional perspective on provisioning systems. Deploying an ecofeminist political economy perspective, we have shown both conceptually and for the example of food provisioning that a systematic connection exists between paid, unpaid, and underpaid work, which is upheld by current power relations. These power asymmetries – and the intersectional inequalities arising from them – must be critically analyzed alongside categories of discrimination such as gender, class, race, and (dis)ability. Such an intersectional perspective on paid, underpaid, and unpaid provisioning can not only make visible barriers for social-ecological transformation but also allows us to address strategies that strengthen social-ecological provisioning by venturing beyond the monetized/non-monetized dichotomy.

Acknowledgements

First of all, we would like to thank the guest editors of this special issue, Richard Bärnthaler, Andreas Novy, and Colleen Schneider, for valuable feedback, ongoing support, and enthusiasm for this article. Moreover, we are grateful to the organizers and the participants of the authors’ workshops “Shaping Provisioning Systems for Social-Ecological Transformation” in October 2022 at WU Vienna for fruitful discussion of our article draft. Specifically, we would like to thank Julia Steinberger, Elke Pirgmaier, Elena Hofferberth, and Gauthier Guerin for being lead discussants of our article. We were grateful for the opportunity to present and discuss our article in the Webinar “Social Ecology as Critical Theory” organized by Éric Pineault and Lucie Violland from the Université du Québec à Montréal and the Webinar “Transformation, Here and Now? Intervention Strategies for a Social-Ecological Transformation in Diverse Provisioning Systems” organized by the International Karl Polanyi Society (IKPS) in Vienna. We further acknowledge Christina Plank’s funding by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (ZK-64G). Last but not least, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor of this article for very constructive feedback, which has helped us to sharpen our argument and make our article overall better.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See https://lilli.leeds.ac.uk.

2 See https://www.sezonieri.at/en/startseite_en.

3 See https://foodchainworkers.org.