Community-supported agriculture in Czechia: Value-based embeddedness and contradictions in the current food regime

• The paper analyzes values and contradictions of community-supported agriculture within the current food regime. • It understands values as different types of embeddedness. • Post-socialist legacy characterizes the current food regime in Czechia. • Core values of CSA focus on the environment, the community and healthy food. • Social, material and institutional contradictions point towards struggles for transformation. Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is a mode of production and consumption based on values that are largely absent in the dominant, profit-driven food regime. In this paper, we explore CSA initiatives in Czechia by examining their values as different types of ecological, social, economic and spatial embeddedness. Drawing on qualitative research in Prague, we show how these forms of value-based embeddedness intersect and are constrained by the social, material and institutional contradictions of the dominant food regime. We analyse these contradictions through three overarching thematic clusters of core values underpinning CSA initiatives – (1) land and environmental protection; (2) community building, equity and solidarity and (3) ethical consumption of healthy fresh food. By doing so, we highlight struggles surrounding CSA’s potential to scale up and further develop within political-economic and institutional surroundings shaped by capitalism and post-socialist legacies.