Presentation short abstract

This paper shows how geopolitical tensions shape environmental care practices and politics. Focusing on Baltic food sovereignty debates, it traces competing care regimes and the power dynamics that structure care across macro and micro scales.

Presentation long abstract

The literature on agri- and environmental care has provided insightful conceptual approaches for thinking about the ways in which care intersects with environmental politics. Yet these approaches tend to overlook the historical and geopolitical situatedness of caring practices and relations. Addressing this gap, this paper examines food sovereignty politics in the Baltic states—Lithuania in particular—to consider how geopolitical tensions shape practices of caring for land. In a region where the war in Ukraine has renewed concerns about ontological security, food sovereignty debates expose competing visions of care, including (1) autarchic care, which frames land as national territory to be protected; (2) neoliberal or developmentalist care, which equates economic growth and participation in global capitalist markets with care for the state and its citizens; (3) smallholder mutual-aid and solidarity care, advanced by local and global peasant movements such as La Via Campesina; (4) gendered domestic care, rooted in self-provisioning and reproductive labor; and (5) more-than-human care networks grounded in everyday multi-species encounters. By tracing how these care regimes intersect and conflict in Lithuania’s public debates and policies, the paper highlights complex power dynamics operating at macro and micro scales. The analysis foregrounds tensions within care itself—between recognizing relationality and interdependencies, on the one hand, and efforts to establish sovereignty under conditions of geopolitical vulnerability and the forces of commodification and exploitation in industrial capitalism, on the other. Overall, the paper shows how environmental care is tied to sovereignty politics, situating resilience within intimate economies of labor, subsistence, obligation, and inter-species relations.