The International Journal of the Commons is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed open-access journal, dedicated to furthering the understanding of institutions for use and management of resources that are (or could be) enjoyed collectively. These resources may be part of the natural world (e.g. forests, climate systems, or the oceans) or they may be created (e.g. infrastructures such as irrigation systems, the internet or (scientific) knowledge, for example of the sort that is published in open-access journals). The IJC is an initiative of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC). Our aim is to promote inclusion, diversity and equity on this platform. To that purpose (and to the extent that we can), we offer support to majority-country scholars, for example through offering waivers, mentorships, and extra review rounds to authors from low and middle income countries affiliated with institutes from low and middle income countries. Contact us to see what we may be able to do for you.
The International Journal of the Commons provides immediate open access to its content. Authors retain copyright of their articles. Articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License (CC-BY 4.0). Authors are explicitly encouraged to deposit their article in their institutional repository. If you have any questions you can always directly contact the Editors.
Concealed Contradictions: Sustainable Development Goals and Indigenous Land Dispossession in Cambodia
This paper examines how the dual forces of Economic Land Concessions and nature conservation projects in Cambodia converge to dispossess the Indigenous Bunong communities of their forest commons—land held as common property and managed collectively by local institutions, with access determined by matrilineal descent. Drawing on ethnographic research, it argues that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), rather than transforming entrenched exclusionary practices, function as an institutional epiphenomenon: a discursive layer that enables the Cambodian state to reframe ongoing dispossession in the language of global sustainability while leaving underlying power structures intact. The analysis exposes how state-led land titling processes and overlapping land allocations perpetuate exclusion, masking the gap between the SDGs’ stated aims and the lived realities of the Bunong. The findings call for a critical reassessment of the SDG framework, emphasizing the need to address the political-economic context and the agency of states in selectively mobilizing global agendas to maintain established patterns of Indigenous exclusion.
Challenges and opportunities of the SDGs for the Commons
Copyright (c) 2025 The Author(s) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Correction: Understanding Institutional Compliance in Flood Risk Management: A Network Analysis Approach Highlighting the Significance of Institutional Linkages and Context
This article details a correction to: Ghorbani, A., Siddiki, S., Mesdaghi, B., Bosch, M., & Abebe, Y. A. (2024). Understanding Institutional Compliance in Flood Risk Management: A Network Analysis Approach Highlighting the Significance of Institutional Linkages and Context. International Journal of the Commons, 18(1), 522–540. https://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.1351
Living with Fire: Relational Approach to Fire in the Uttarakhand Himalaya
Changing fire regimes amidst the planetary ecological crisis demand a rethinking of human-fire relationships. This rethinking has led to growing calls for moving away from anti-fire strategies and recognising the necessity of living with fire. Focusing on the Uttarakhand Himalaya, this study examines how approaches that align with ‘living with fire’ shape and intervene in the management of commons. It analyses three distinct burning practices: prescribed burning by the state, traditional burning in commons, and burning in enclosures by a subset of community members. Adopting a relational approach, this study explores how these practices foster collective futures, perpetuate exclusions, or uphold colonial logic. Data collection involved participant observation, participatory methods, and interviews with community members and forest department staff. The findings reveal that while these burning practices overlap in their physical characteristics, such as intensity and timing, they differ significantly in the relations they emerge from and the multispecies worlds they co-create. Traditional burning is central to managing commons in the region and is underpinned by relations of care, reciprocity, and responsibility. In contrast, state-led prescribed burning and enclosure-based practices reinforce exclusionary dynamics and undermine collective action. The study cautions against an uncritical adoption of ‘living with fire’ and emphasises the importance of foregrounding relational difference. Convivial human-fire relations must be understood in terms of their role in fostering social justice and collective action, grounded in relations of care and responsibility.
Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Commons
“Parasites in Our Country”: Eradicating Ants in the Surinamese Amazon as a Means of Colonial Enclosure
Suriname, considered the most forested country in the world, is home to a variety of Amazonian communities, both of Amerindian and African (Maroon) descent. The shifting cultivation that was required by their Amazonian environment has over the past centuries led to the emergence of intricate schemes to effectively manage common land resources. As this contribution shows, leafcutter ants have importantly served human communities by increasing and indicating levels of soil fertility and recommending the pace of shifting from one plot to the next. Over the past century, extractive activities (gold, bauxite and hydroelectricity) have set in motion a still ongoing process of ‘enclosing’ Suriname’s Amazonian space. Ant eradication programmes implemented in the 1940s and 50s by the Agricultural Research Centre of Suriname departed from a profoundly racialized belief in “essential” characteristics of different Amazonian communities. This contribution argues that ant–human coexistence became an instrumental argument to showcase the alleged ‘primitivity’, ‘ecological destructiveness’ or even the ‘parasitic nature’ of certain Amazonian communities, which aided in their marginalization and eventual resettlement.
Copyright (c) 2026 The Author(s) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Self-Governance and Adaptation: Rethinking Indigenous Arctic Histories
How can a self-governance perspective reshape our understanding of Indigenous Arctic histories? This paper aims at advancing our understanding about aboriginal societies and their historical use of common pool resources. By applying a self-governance approach, it moves beyond state-centric narratives that have long dominated interpretations of historical change, and highlights how Indigenous agency and internal dynamics have shaped historical trajectories. Aboriginal societies around the world have independently transitioned their production modes throughout history. In northern Eurasia, one such major transition manifested in a movement away from transport reindeer herding towards reindeer pastoralism from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Northern Fennoscandia was one of the first regions to witness this shift, and the Indigenous Sami there are an especially suitable case to study. The historical sources are exceptionally rich in the area, and Sami are an interesting case because reindeer pastoralism developed in a foraging culture, with many households continuing on as hunters and fishers long after pastoralism had been introduced. The shift to pastoralism was driven by concomitant, self-governed responses as the transition progressed. By combining historical sources and self-governance frameworks, this analysis advances the discussion about how Indigenous reindeer-herding societies – governance and social relations included – were affected by the transformation from 1550–1800 AD. The Sami case reflects that there was a dynamic interaction between customary rules-in-use and colonial rules-in-form, that complicates interpretations of Indigenous societies as either autonomous or passive in historical shifts.
Landscapes and Cyberscapes of the Commons: Scottish Festivals in the Pandemic and Beyond
This paper investigates how Scottish festivals chose to implement commoning practices in both digital and hybrid spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilising a deductive thematic analysis approach, the authors draw out emergent themes from a series of interviews with festivals conducted between October 2020 and September 2021 to develop a set of aspects or commonalities between commoning practices for digital and hybrid festivals. The authors examine how some of these commoning practices are directly linked to traditional understandings of the cultural commons, such as the sharing of physical and knowledge resources with other organizations or shared forms of governance. While describing festivals as “commons” in themselves would be reductive and conceptually contentious, this paper argues not only that festivals can include commoning practices, but that these are inherently relevant to their identity and audiences that, even in times of extreme operational restrictions, these remain central to their activities.
Empire by Proxy: Private Actors and De Facto Expansion of Sovereignty in History and Space
Outer space is increasingly used to expand and entrench State power due to a legal framework that proclaims universal freedoms while enabling de facto domination by actors with existing capital and technological capacity. This dynamic is visible in the U.S.’ expanding space infrastructure and growing monopolisation of Low Earth Orbits (LEO), which has been greatly accelerated by its private enterprise and which threatens equal access for other space actors. This paper traces the historical and symbiotic relationship between States and private actors in appropriating extraterritorial areas and resources, and the role that international law played in enabling, legitimising and entrenching such practices. Drawing parallels with historical accounts of private-turned-public appropriation, it highlights how private actors were pivotal in extending and amplifying State power. It then examines how similar dynamics and colonial rhetoric have returned to be applied to outer space, where ongoing State practice and legal developments risk following a similar pattern of facilitating and entrenching domination by States with current space capacities.
Multispecies Constitutionality: Governing Human-Wildlife Interaction Beyond Anthropocentrism
The question of the role of non-humans in conservation has given rise to a number of pressing debates. Proponents of ecocentrism, multispecies ethnography or the post-human turn have all aimed to promote more-than-human perspectives and attribute equal importance to all forms of (animate) life. However, their relative failure to translate this advocacy into actual conservation decision making has given rise to the question how to appropriately represent non-humans in conservation governance for more inclusive and just conservation. This paper introduces and outlines an approach to addressing this issue we term multispecies constitutionality by exploring a case of human-bear interactions in the commons of the Rodopi mountains of Bulgaria, where outmigration and postsocialist transformations have emptied space for brown bears in areas previously inhabited or managed by humans. Building on longstanding exploration of common pool resource governance, growing discussion of “constitutionality” is intended to capture how the “agency and creativity” of bottom-up governance processes are able to effectively manage natural resources in the absence of external authority, while still accounting for local power relations in a way commons research has often overlooked. Yet both commons and consitutionality research has thus far remained focused on how humans decide among themselves how to interact with nonhumans without actively including the latter. Here, we expand our focus to take into account calls for inclusion of “more-than-human” perspectives in governance and decision-making to achieve a more holistic understanding of human-bear coexistence and introduce an approach for investigating multispecies interactions that accounts for the role of non-human actors in shaping shared landscapes.
Socio-institutional Considerations of Fishway Implementation at the Community-level in Southeast Asia
Throughout Southeast Asia irrigation development has allowed for agricultural yield gains and is an important development activity. To minimise the adverse environmental and social implications of these barriers within water systems, ‘fish friendly’ irrigation structures have been implemented, allowing fish passage for migrating fish to complete their lifecycles. Fishway literature has focussed largely on the biological and physical elements of fishways and ignored the human dimensions, such as community level social context. Yet it is often people who are the beneficiaries of improved fish passage and required for the proper functioning of the infrastructure. This study explored this community level social context of fishway sites throughout Cambodia, Laos and Indonesia using a qualitative approach, drawing on interviews and focus group discussions. Our findings suggest 5 key lessons: 1) The “social licence” of fishways needs to be established with surrounding communities and renegotiated over time; 2) communities should somehow benefit from fishway implementation (at least not be harmed); 3) consider the socio-cultural context of the fishway place; 4) consider the socio-economic context of the fishway place; and 5) consider the socio-institutional context of the fishway place. We conclude that community-level dynamics need to be considered in fishway implementation for a more holistic approach. Further research in this area could focus on the informal and formal institutional arrangements of fishway site management.
How to Survive Without Commons? Conflicts Over Forests and Coping Strategies of the Poor in the Post-Feudal Period in the Northeastern Part of the Habsburg Empire
The article deals with the conflicts over common forests and peasants’ common rights in the first decades after the abolition of serfdom in the north-eastern part of the Austrian Empire (Galicia). The analysis focuses on the revolutionary agrarian reforms that had a direct impact on the existential condition of former serfs. On the one hand, the peasants received the land they had been cultivating and no longer had to work for free for the nobility. On the other hand, they lost access to the common lands and common rights that had been essential for their everyday life. As a result, the peasants developed their own coping strategy due to the lack of resources necessary for survival, i.e. through illegal acts such as thefts of natural resources in the manor forests.
Urban Communities, Housing Commons, and Real Estate Investment: Revisiting Housing Cooperative Development in Senegal Since the Beavers Experiment
Since the 2000s, the renewed interest in housing cooperatives in the Global South has ascribed to them a number of virtues: a successful mechanism for mutual aid and escape from poverty, a “third way” in the face of the failures of public production and the speculative excesses of private production. However, there is a lack of empirical studies documenting the concrete development and operations of housing cooperatives. This article aims to contribute to studies on housing cooperatives by examining their history and implementation in Senegal, drawing on the literature and first-hand data from interviews and case studies in the Dakar region. Senegalese housing cooperatives occupy a unique place in the West African cooperative landscape given their longevity since the late 1950s and the political and militant support they periodically receive. More specifically, we examine both shifts in the institutional support to cooperatives in Senegal, and shifts in understandings and practices of solidarity along Senegal’s socio-political transformations. This provides a nuanced picture of Senegalese cooperative. They have been the leading producer of formal housing in Senegal over the past decades. Nevertheless, the cooperative movement is weaker today, despite a public support in political discourse. Finally, current cooperative production leaves little room for the principles of sustainable communities beyond the step of land acquisition, for collective commitment to long-term maintenance, and for intergenerational affordability of land and housing.
Land-based commons for housing and inclusive cities
Just Institutions or just Institutions? Research on Groundwater Justice in the European Union
This qualitative systematic literature review examines discussions on groundwater justice in the European Union (EU) by analyzing 51 peer-reviewed academic articles that address groundwater governance and justice-related issues. The review identifies a limited number of studies that explicitly focus on groundwater justice, with most research emphasizing the local and regional institutional setup for groundwater distribution, particularly in agricultural contexts in Spain and France. Key themes in the literature include the role of institutions in regulating groundwater distribution, decision-making processes, and the recognition of different forms of knowledge. The literature also examines groundwater markets, often in relation to their potential to exacerbate inequalities, and explores the historical development of groundwater rights regimes, highlighting their continued influence on governance and water rights regimes. Additionally, studies discuss how infrastructure investments can further amplify inequalities, particularly as groundwater levels decline. The limited explicit focus on groundwater justice in the EU may be linked to disciplinary traditions in commons scholarship and environmental justice research that tend to focus on institutions and high-profile cases of injustices, respectively. This paper highlights how grounded justice perspectives from EJ and Water justice literature based on capabilities and power can analyze more subtle cases of injustice. The review suggests that integrating uncertainty as an analytical category might be fruitful for groundwater justice research since uncertainties regarding groundwater materiality and modelling ultimately influence institutions mediating groundwater access and decision-making processes. Future research could therefore explore the relationship between uncertainty and justice, specifically how uncertainties shape groundwater rights distributions and decision-making processes.
News on Biodiversity? An Analysis of the Biodiversity Discourse in European News Outlets in 2010 and 2022
The loss of global biodiversity is recognised by politics and science as a global crisis. Its anthropogenic causes require a radical societal transformation, but stakeholder interests and low political priority decelerate action. The term’s complexity and its vague usage in everyday life hinder public engagement and allow for a variety of understandings of the drivers and impacts of biodiversity decline in public discourse. News outlets play a crucial role in shaping how biodiversity is understood and valued. This study explores how European news outlets represent “biodiversity” and traces the evolution of this discourse over time. Using a case study approach, we analysed the discourse on biodiversity in news articles from Austria, Czechia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and United Kingdom. For each country, five widely circulated national news outlets with diverse ideological perspectives were selected. For each news outlet, we collected articles mentioning biodiversity published in 2010 and 2022, yielding 169 and 385 articles, respectively. The articles were analysed using a qualitative content analysis in which statements were categorised with a framework focusing on definitions, values, rhetorical functions and actors. The results show that biodiversity is only rarely defined in European media. Over time, its attributed values have shifted from nature-centred (‘ecocentric’) to human-centred (‘anthropocentric’), though the implications of this shift remain unclear. Additionally, while the term used to be frequently associated with scientific actors in 2010, by 2022 a broader range of actors, mainly NGOs and governments, had gained prominence. Cross-country differences were also noted, particularly in the emotional tone of reporting. The analysis offers a broad overview of biodiversity discourse of European news outlets and offers valuable insights for future policy and communication strategies. This nuanced analysis underscores the complexity and plurality of biodiversity values and discourses in Europe.
Societal Transformations and Biodiversity
Commoning in a Hyperdiverse Neighbourhood: Insights From a Community Festival in Nicosia
By examining the annual ‘Pame Kaimakli’ festival in Nicosia, Cyprus, this article explores how self-organized urban collectives can create urban commons through cultural production. Drawing on a decade-long, embedded case study and a mixed-methods approach, the study examines how the festival, curated by a local NGO together with residents and collaborators, is transforming a hyperdiverse neighbourhood. We introduce the concept of ‘nurturing the commons’, describing the festival’s capacity to foster common narratives and mobilize inclusive participation, shared governance, and spatial co-production. The festival’s recurring nature embeds artistic and cultural practices into neighbourhood life, sustaining relationships and counteracting the temporal constraints often associated with grassroots urbanism. By framing the festival through practices of commoning—organizational strategies, participatory socio-spatial repertoires, and negotiated spatial governance—the article discusses how festivals can generate concrete entry points into the commons within hyperdiverse urban environments. In doing so, it challenges dominant framings of festivals as economic or branding tools, instead positioning them as civic laboratories that foster diversity, creativity, and new forms of collective urbanism. JEL Classification Codes: Z13; Z10; O35
School Gardens as Commons: Fostering Relational Values for Biodiversity Through Participatory Environmental Education
Children are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of the current environmental, economic and health crises. As part of the European Union-funded PLANET4B project, the transformative potential of Hungarian biodiversity education on children’s values, worldviews and behaviour was assessed through a critical systemic analysis, key informant interviews, and various participatory methods applied in school gardens. This paper shares some key lessons learnt from a long-lasting study conducted in one of the partner schools via two projects. In 2018, the school set up a garden together with researchers who investigated the evolution of both human-human and human-environment interactions in the frame of a participatory action research process. Throughout PLANET4B this process was continued and assessed from a long-term perspective to see if and how values, behaviour and practices can be transformed over time at the practical, personal and political level. Occasions to spend more time in the garden, and practising commoning activities, generated an emerging safe collaborative space. Here shared values could be discussed and developed, and jointly held understandings on mutual responsibility and care could be formed. Beside positive changes in individual perceptions and social norms, newly emerging teaching practices were observed, which triggered the school to further invest in nature-based solutions. Based on these results, we argue that consciously selected and carefully designed in-class and extracurricular activities can create shared values for nature, and contribute to behavioural and organisational change. Moreover, learning new ways of living and doing, such as commoning, can raise doubts about the current system and show an alternative vision for a socio-ecological future based on solidarity.
Pastoralist Mobility Choices and Resource Access: The Dynamics of Pastoral Systems in Eastern Sudan
This paper investigates the changing mobility practices of pastoralists in Sudan as they seek to sustain their livelihoods. The study focuses on the Fallata pastoralists in Gadarif State, eastern Sudan, as a case study to demonstrate these changes. Traditionally relying on long-distance movements to seasonal grazing areas, much of it across communal grazing lands, to access seasonal grazing areas, these pastoralists now face significant challenges due to the expansion of mechanized agriculture, land privatization, and environmental degradation. Using a mixed-methods approach—incorporating interviews, field observations, remote sensing, and participatory geographical information systems (PGIS)—the research reveals that the Fallata pastoralists have adapted to fragmented landscapes through a range of coping and adaptive strategies, including localized and intermediate-scale movements, seasonal east-west shifts toward riverine and border areas, the use of truck transport for livestock, and increasing integration with farming activities. Some occasionally cross the border into Ethiopia to access grazing and water resources. These evolving practices reflect a flexible and resilient response to land-use constraints, resource scarcity, and insecurity in eastern Sudan. However, some of the coping strategies carry economic risks and potential social and ecological impacts. These findings highlight the urgent need for policy reforms that support sustainable pastoral mobility and conflict resolution, grounded in the specific experiences of the Fallata pastoralists. By reflecting the realities of fragmented landscapes, negotiated access, and adaptive strategies, the study contributes to the growing debate on what makes nomadic pastoralist land-use systems resilient under conditions of climate change and uncertainty.
Institutional Bricolage and Commoning in Community-Driven Development Projects in Brazilian Agrarian Settlements
This article applies theories of commoning and institutional bricolage to analyze how agrarian settlements in Northeastern Brazil navigated a World Bank community-driven development (CDD) project focused on infrastructure and productive activities. This project evolved out of a successful Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) occupation of state offices that secured access to rural development funds, resulting in an unusual partnership where the MST selected recipient settlements and partnered with state agencies for implementation under standard CDD guidelines. Using mixed methods across eight settlements, including 62 interviews, a household survey (n = 93), and site visits, I analyze how communities with robust governance and collective work institutions developed through commoning practices navigated the CDD project framework. Settlers acted as bricoleurs (Cleaver, 2012) to adapt settlement institutions to support CDD project governance and collective work. These actions are analyzed through de Koning’s three processes of institutional bricolage (2011): alteration (minimal compliance with bureaucratic requirements while maintaining existing governance), aggregation (repurposing settlement institutions to manage projects), and articulation (resisting external sanctions that conflicted with local norms). While settlement institutions enabled project implementation, they proved insufficient for addressing technical and marketing challenges. Even in settlements with strong collective organization, where CDD had the best chance of success, project effectiveness depended on existing commoning practices rather than CDD’s institutional framework, representing a fundamental misalignment between the external agency and the settlements.
Energy Commons During Crisis: Understanding Housing Cooperative Strategies Through Dramaturgical Sociology
The importance of energy as a common good becomes especially pronounced during crises. This paper reconstructs the response of housing cooperatives – a specific type of energy community – to the energy crisis. To this end, we apply eighteen impression management strategies inspired by Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology. We analyse a unique dataset of annual reports from Polish rural housing cooperatives, which display a range of reactive, proactive, and collaborative attitudes to high energy prices and fuel shortages following the embargo on Russian coal in 2022. The energy crisis led four out of five rural housing cooperatives to adopt defensive impression management strategies. The three most common were crisis attribution (66%), resourceful management (18%), and deliberative silence (12%). These strategies appear to reflect an effort to position cooperatives within a dual role, balancing social and economic rationales. The collective attitudes undertaken by the cooperative boards to support common resources were also ambiguous, reinforcing existing power hierarchies and dominant logics rather than emerging from grassroots initiatives, due to the limited capacities and incentives in structurally disadvantaged areas. Therefore, our findings portray rural housing cooperatives as solitary and routine actors, undertaking an effort often beyond their capacities and call for their greater recognition as energy commons crucial for ensuring local energy security.
Energy Commons: collective action for sustainable energy
The Governance of the ReFi Ecosystem: Integrity in Voluntary Carbon Markets as a Common Resource
Addressing the shortcomings of the Voluntary Carbon Markets (VCMs), a nascent blockchain industry has disrupted this area with an ever-growing number of projects leveraging open-source, decentralised base-layer platforms (e.g. Ethereum, Cosmos) and business-oriented decentralized applications (Dapps). Building on this emerging digital infrastructure over the Internet, community-driven decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are building new socio-technical systems for decentralized finance (DeFi) and, more recently, regenerative finance (ReFi). Both areas are making their way into VCMs promising improved transparency, efficiency and greater accessibility. This paper examines the goals, scope, and intended outcomes of prominent blockchain-based ReFi projects in the VCM space. In particular, it explores the potential for commons-based outcomes emerging from peer-to-peer configurations in the VCM. Using a qualitative approach, the study analyses text-data from industry whitepapers focusing on the cases of Celo, Regen, Toucan, Klima and Moss. The findings show the ReFi ecosystem as a low-transaction-cost environment fostering open-source prototypes of peer-production for carbon accounting and trading. These innovations materialize through application interfaces operating on base-layer blockchains running smart-contracts and tokens. The tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) or rights (e.g. renewable energy generation, storage capacity, or forestry land) and the automation of operations (e.g. exchanges) via smart contracting, provides participants with new affordances for secure, bi-directional coordination in near-real time. The preliminary conclusion is that, while the ReFi organizations considered seem to be Ostrom-compliant with regard to some principles (e.g. clearly defined boundaries, procedures for making own rules, monitoring, or minimal recognition of rights) others are still ad-hoc practices or work in progress (e.g. graduated sanctions or dispute resolution mechanisms). This study contributes to the critical exploration of enhanced governance mechanisms, enabled by technological innovation, that can address climate action challenges and provide viable alternatives to traditional market-based approaches.
The concept of commons has gained traction in housing research. However, when translated to the housing field, the notion of commons is interpreted in various ways and applied to a large range of situations. This increasing interest in the commons has thus resulted in a high degree of conceptual pluralism in the field. While this pluralism is inevitable, and, to a certain extent, necessary to grasp a complex social reality, it can also lead to confusion. This article addresses this issue by conducting a systematic scoping review of the literature from 1990 to 2023 to capture how the concept of commons is used in housing research. Using thematic coding and k-mode clustering, we identify five distinct clusters: (i) “commons in housing”, with a focus on collective action problems, (ii) “housing as commons”, with a focus on the use-value of collective housing arrangements and their de-commodification, (iii) “commoning in housing”, with a focus on socially reproductive collective practices, (iv) “commons/commoning for housing”, with a focus on co-production in housing and urban governance, and (v) “commons/commoning as a political practice”, with a focus on everyday politics and housing activism. Our cluster-based approach thus provides a valuable framework to navigate the pluralism of the field and can be replicated in other subject areas.
Collective Subjectivation in Socially Innovative Commoning
This paper focuses on subjectivities of agents involved in socially innovative commoning practices. Social change agents, often influenced by neoliberal ideologies and individualist subjectivities, sometimes prioritize ‘practical’ approaches over approaches addressing the complexity of social relations and ethics in commoning; this can unintentionally undermine collective efforts, reinforcing the very systems these initiatives seek to dismantle. Responding to insights from our four-year large-scale research project on commoning, the paper proposes the groundwork for examining subjectivities and subjectivation processes within socially innovative commoning. It draws from an open definition of subjectivity volunteered by the psychologist Fernando González Rey, highlighting how subjectivity of actors is deeply intertwined with cultural, historical, and social contexts. It addresses individual and social subjectivation, showing how collective subjectivity is formed through their interaction. Collective subjectivation is staged by drawing from three literatures that give attention to the role of subjectivity and subjectivation in social and political action: political ecology (emotional and performative experiences of subjects as driving forces for the politics of resistance), ecofeminism (understanding affective and communicative social relations among humans and between humans and more-than-humans in everyday experiences), and anarchism (exploring the interplay between individual freedom and social cooperation in reimagining the political subject and community building). Collective subjectivation involves re-imagining and re-building social relations on the grounds of solidarity in opposition to dominant individualist mindsets, engaging in human-nature interactions, and integrating personal emotions, affective dimensions, and psychoanalytic insights to stimulate new collective practices.
Enlisting Biodiversity: Steering Public Discourse to Win Support for Policies on Biodiversity Challenges
Discourses are linguistic expressions of socially constructed understandings of phenomena, which drive power dynamics by implicitly conveying values that may either support or suppress the interests of involved actors. Proponents of specific discourses often seek to establish their interpretation of a phenomenon as the predominant or sole narrative with the aim of furthering their own interests. This is particularly concerning when applied to complex public issues, such as biodiversity loss, in a post truth age in which alterative facts and misinformation can shape public debate and social perceptions more powerfully than objective evidence or rational argument. This paper examines how interest groups perceive and communicate about biodiversity, which sheds light on the underlying worldview, interests, and strategies behind their messaging. We examined documents from two biodiversity-relevant actor groups in Europe: political parties in Italy, Switzerland, Norway, and Austria; and environmental NGOs in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Norway. Text elements within the documents were categorised according to their rhetorical functions, including ‘warning’, ‘calling for action (or inaction)’, ‘informing’, ‘persuading’, ‘accusing’, ‘entertaining’, ‘othering’, and ‘raising hope’. The analysis reveals that political parties predominantly employ a rhetoric centred on ‘persuading’, ‘accusing’, and ‘othering’, aiming to rationalise and gain political support their stances and/or to assert themselves as solutions to biodiversity challenges. Environmental NGOs, on the other hand, use rhetoric focussed on ‘informing’, ‘warning’, and ‘persuading’, with consequences of action or inaction often linked to human impacts, to appeal to potential and actual supporters of their activities. These findings reveal the strategic use of biodiversity discourse by different actors to influence their targeted audiences, which provides insights for those interested in creating interventions to influence stakeholder perceptions and behaviours.
Multiple Challenges in Mind, Biodiversity out of Sight: Insights on the Need for Structural Transformations
Although biodiversity loss is a key challenge of our time, it remains largely neglected in the broader societal discourse. Research that systematically investigates the question how attention for biodiversity competes or interacts with attention for other issues remains nascent and scarce. Against this background, we conducted an information-provision experiment that presented people with information from selected societal challenges and looked at how this exposure influenced their attention toward biodiversity loss. Specifically, we reminded participants recruited from the general population of Germany about Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine at the time when both of these societal challenges dominated the media. To mimic real-world conditions, we used predominantly negatively-framed media content. Our findings indicated less priority to addressing biodiversity loss after being reminded of other societal challenges, leading to a so-called saturation. However, we found that personal importance of biodiversity to individuals was much stronger behavioural predictor while respondents indicating the deeper personal change is in principle possible (although not necessarily in any specific direction). These findings highlight boundaries of information-based interventions (e.g., choice architecture vs reflexive learning), stressing the need for deeper social and structural processes making biodiversity personally important. The research enhances our understanding of a key provision dilemma – individuals’ willingness to contribute to addressing biodiversity loss, particularly while dealing with multiple societal challenges. JEL Classification Codes: D91; Q28; Q57; Q58
Crafting Combinations to Govern Groundwater: Knowledge, Motivation, and Agency
Groundwater is a vital common pool resource for water supply, irrigation, and ecosystems, but can be difficult to govern due to invisibility, conflicting interests, and limitations of available institutions. While there are many policy and technical instruments (tools) available, efforts to apply them are often ineffective. This special issue of the International Journal of the Commons presents a set of papers with insights into policy instruments and other methods for groundwater governance. The relevance and effectiveness of tools and combinations of tools (toolboxes) in addressing problems that emerge from groundwater use is related to how they fit with diverse physical and social contexts. Drawing on research and applied experience, including that presented in this issue, we outline a conceptual framework for groundwater governance that emphasizes attention not just to knowledge, but also to motivations, and to agency for effective coordination among key actors. Articles in the special issue analyze groundwater governance in areas of Africa (east, south, and north), Central Asia, India, and the United States. The articles cover a range of scales from small groups playing experiential games to international agreements about transboundary aquifers. Several papers illustrate the crucial role of knowledge about groundwater, and the need for governance instruments and interventions to go beyond only changing knowledge. Three papers focus on groundwater games and their use to understand and change behavior, especially when combined with other tools that facilitate collective deliberation and action. Several papers illustrate how understanding of the ways people care about and practice care for groundwater illuminates examples and capabilities for groundwater governance. Highlights There are many institutional tools for governing groundwater, but no panaceas, and successes are rare Effective groundwater governance requires that key stakeholders have combinations of knowledge, motivation, and agency to act together effectively Groundwater co-management can combine stakeholders’ knowledge, values, and collective action with external science, resources, and authority Participatory processes can craft combinations of tools to fit contexts and pursue shared gains
Crafting combinations to govern groundwater
Copyright (c) 2024 The Author(s) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Robust Collective Action by Farm Producers: Analyzing Co-Operatives as Common Property Institutions
Common property institutions are often analyzed with Ostrom’s design principles, yet there are few applications of the analytical framework to institutions owned and controlled by organized farm producers (i.e. farm producer co-operatives). Applicable to any human group with a common interest, the potential of the design principles to study farm producer co-operatives as common property institutions is appealing as current theories and frameworks do not completely or satisfactorily explain their survival or longevity. Prior literature is consulted to determine if and how each of the design principles is applicable to farm producer co-operatives. To help inform a future research agenda, we highlight the analytical limitations and the empirical challenges of the design principles to study farm producer co-operatives as common property institutions. JEL Classifications: D23, L14, Q13