Unintentionally sustainable consumption in households in Central and Eastern Europe: environmental ‘inconspicuous innovations’

Slavomíra Ferenčuhová, Anja Decker, Petr Jehlička

Central and Eastern European societies (CEE) abound with routine, domestic, informal everyday practices of households that, as we claim, are ‘inconspicuously innovative’ and sustainable. Practices that reduce consumption of natural resources (e.g., by using rainwater, or reusing material for construction work), and practices that shorten food supply chains, increase efficiency of food processing and reduce food waste, have a clearly positive environmental effect. Yet, this environmentally friendly dimension of such practices is often unintentional and unreflected by those who perform them, as they do not follow them for their sustainability effect (see Jehlička 2021). We approach these mundane practices as having a transformative and innovative potential – in the sense of having capacity to alter dominant practices of consumption if widely shared. This potential is largely overlooked by experts on sustainable consumption and adaptation to the global environmental change, as well as by those who perform them in their households, sometimes already for a long time. In our presentation we discuss several examples of these inconspicuous innovations. Our theoretical background is, first, in the research and theory of ‘inconspicuous consumption’ in environmental sociology (Shove and Warde 2002) and frugality, and second, in theories of everyday life. Our case studies are anchored in ethnographic and qualitative research conducted in CEE.

Our presentation will be a theoretical contribution introducing the concept of inconspicuous innovations. At the same time, we wish to discuss empirical findings from several case studies that we have performed previously and that will elucidate the analytical value of this concept. This paper is a work-in-progress, although we are working on its publication during 2022.

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