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The sustainable use and the organisation of common resources is highly complex. With the focus on alternative, utopia-inspired urban neighbourhood initiatives in Switzerland this research project proposes experimental design and inquiry into media-based thinking tools which will help to better illustrate, demonstrate and negotiate the complexity of these sharing processes.
Commons are sustainably and collectively managed resources, such as food, or communication infrastructures, such as Wi-Fi. Commoning, then, is the activity of sharing these resources. The aspiration formulated throughout numerous alternative, utopia-inspired projects that seeks to design infrastructural aspects of urban everyday life in an alternative and autonomous way, through commoning, raises several questions. Since, based on the high level of complexity that (occasionally) comes with the shared use of resources, for the individual community member it is often difficult to estimate his or her own action and consequences to the very last detail. Especially when it comes to unpredictable, complex adaptive processes, he or she can no longer completely grasp them intuitively nor follow them without the help of media-based thinking tools — such as computer-based models or scenarios — which make those processes not only visible but also comprehensible.
For this reason, a mobile software application will be developed and tested in close collaboration with the members of three Swiss urban neighborhood projects: NeNa1 in Zurich, LeNa in Basel and Warmbächli in Bern. We will create playful simulations and design new thought-spaces for commoning. Our aim is to enable alternative and engaging ways for future social participation and transformation processes.
The four-year project, which combines methods from humanities, social science and design inquires the following central question: How could an experimental and community-based approach to design and development of a digital game system stimulate reflection on the intuitively incomprehensible complexity of commoning, make it more understandable and negotiable through playing and gaming?
Image: CC BY-SA 3.0 by P.M. Remix and effects by Kayla Bolsinger
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]]>Fortunately, there exist many experiments with non-capitalist modes of assessing and exchanging value, sharing goods and services, and making decisions that can help us transition to a more sustainable political economy based on principles of degrowth. One of the best ways to generate non-capitalist subjects, objects, and spaces comes from systems designed to manage common pool resources like the atmosphere, ocean, and forests. Commons-based systems depend upon self-governance and reciprocity. People rely on and take responsibility for each other, finding mutually beneficial ways to fulfill their needs. This also allows communities to define the guidelines and incentives for guiding their own economic behavior, affording people more autonomy and greater opportunity for protecting and cultivating shared values. Commons-based systems cut across the private/public, market/state dichotomy and present alternative economic arrangements defined by communities.
According to David Bollier, “As the grand, centralized market/state systems of the 20th century begin to implode through their own dysfunctionality, the commons will more swiftly step into the breach by offering more local, convivial and trusted systems of survival.”3 Already, there is evidence of this happening. The commons is spreading rapidly among communities hit hardest by recent financial crises and the failures of austerity policies. In response to the failures of the state and market, many crises-stricken areas, especially in Europe and South America, have developed solidarity economies to self-manage resources, thus insulating themselves from systemic shocks in the future. It seems likely that a community’s capacity to share will be crucial to its survival on a wetter, hotter, and meaner planet.
From the perspective of researchers, there are several different ways to define the commons. In most cases, the commons are understood to be material objects. For example, the atmosphere and ocean are global commons, because they are resources we must all learn to regulate and share collectively. This notion of the commons as material resource goes hand-in-hand with another notion that the commons can be both material and immaterial, a product of either nature or culture. Using this second definition enhances our appreciation for what is often undervalued by traditional economic measures such as care work, shared knowledge production, and cultural preservation. Together, both these perspectives are helpful in devising political and economic strategies for managing the commons, which remains the dominant interest of most commons researchers and policymakers.
Nevertheless, whether material or immaterial, the commons are viewed as a given concept or thing, ignoring that more fundamentally they are generated by social practices. In other words, there are no commons without commoners to enact them. From an enactive perspective, commons are not objects, but actions generated by many different actors in relationship. Whereas the prior notions assume that individuals need to be regulated and punished to prevent overconsumption (an assumption known as the tragedy of the commons), an enactive perspective on commons conceives the individual in relation to everyone (and everything) involved in co-managing the more-than-human commons. It therefore diverges from the prior two notions in assuming a relational epistemology rather than being premised on a liberal epistemology based on the individual. From a Buddhist perspective, one could say that the commons emerges co-dependently with a field of objects, forces, and passions entangling the human and nonhuman, living and non-living, organic and machinic.
The more-than-human commons thus does not dualistically separate the material and immaterial commons, the commons (as object) from the commoners (as subjects), nor does it separate humans from nonhumans. Instead, the commons are always understood as a more-than-human achievement, neither wholly produced by nature or culture. Commoning becomes, as Bayo Akomolafe points out, a material-discursive doing shaped by practices and values that engage humans with their environments.4 In Patterns of Commoning, David Bollier and Silke Helfrich argue that all commons exceed conceptual distinctions, because they are not things; rather, they are another way of being, thinking about, and shaping the world.5 Commoning is about sharing the responsibility for stewardship with the intent to construct a fair, free, and sustainable world—a goal that is all the more important given the unequal distribution of risks posed by intensifying climate change.
Read the entire essay/issue at The Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture & Politics.
Zack Walsh is a PhD candidate in the Process Studies graduate program at Claremont School of Theology. His research is transdisciplinary, exploring process-relational, contemplative, and engaged Buddhist approaches to political economy, sustainability, and China. His most recent writings provide critical and constructive reflection on mindfulness trends, while developing contemplative pedagogies and practices for addressing social and ecological issues. He is a research specialist at Toward Ecological Civilization, the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China, and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany. He has also received lay precepts from Fo Guang Shan, an engaged Buddhist organization based in Taiwan, and attended numerous meditation and monastic retreats in Thailand, China, and Taiwan. For further information and publications, please connect: https://cst.academia.edu/ZackWalsh, https://www.facebook.com/walsh.zack, and https://www.snclab.ca/category/blog/contemplative-ecologies/.
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]]>EXTENDED ABSTRACT SUBMISSION: FEBRUARY 25, 2018
The organizers of the IASC Workshop ‘Social mobilization and the commons: a virtuous circle?’ welcome proposals and letters of interest for this workshop.
Theme
The frontiers of theory and research on the commons have notably evolved in the last years. At the forefront of such evolution is the study of political struggles. Social movements are one means through which power and political struggles manifest in commons-management contexts. Even more, social mobilization and community-based management of commons are two paradigmatic instances of collective action, the interaction of which has been barely explored so far. The common pool resource (CPR) tradition has mainly focused on the local conditions under which natural resource users can cooperatively manage their shared resources. The social movement (SM) tradition includes a number of strands concerned with different characteristics of mobilization and their impact on policy. To be sure, CPR and other commons studies reporting on social mobilization processes exist, but there is no systematic dialogue among those studies, nor between those studies and the social movement literature.
Aims and goals
This workshop aims to create a much needed space for knowledge sharing among scholars or non-academics interested in the intersection between social movements and commons. The workshop has been designed to cover a variety of empirical settings, methods and epistemological approaches. The papers may be either conceptual or empirical, and may address questions of general concern to this dynamic, or specifically related to either movements’ influence on commons, or commons’ influence on movements. Questions to be addressed include:
- Which positive/negative feedbacks exist between the commons and social movements?
- To which extent can social movement and CPR theory speak to each other?
- How do social movements influence commons management?
- Under what conditions do social movements successfully transition into long-enduring community-based commons initiatives?
- To what extent and how do existing or latent commons serve as the basis for social mobilization?
- Which configurations of actors, geographies, actions, discourses… characterize “commons-based movements”?
- Are there fruitful comparisons between commons-based movements in rural and urban contexts?
The workshop aims to accomplish several goals, including
- high-quality dialogue and collaborative learning that can strengthening participants’ ongoing initiatives on this topic;
- the compilation of high-quality contributions for a special issue in a top-ranked journal (e.g., World Development, GEC, Journal of Peasant Studies);
- the drafting of a collective paper synthesizing and setting the agenda for the years to come.
Workshop organization
The workshop will consist of 6 panel sessions, a public opening session including two key note speakers, and a closing plenary including a round table among four invited discussants.
The panel sessions (4 presenters per session) will be sequential and organized to maximize discussion (5 min. presentation + 15 min. discussion per presentation).
- All attendants will need to commit to give written feedback to the other participants.
- They will be given 5 minutes to open the discussion of each presenter.
- They will be also responsible for moderating the corresponding discussion.
The closing plenary will include a round table among three invited speakers who will address key insights from the panels with the aim of setting the agenda for the years to come.
Timeline (changed dates!)
PLEASE NOTE: CHANGED DATES! WORKSHOP WILL TAKE PLACE ON JUNE 21-22, 2018
> February 25, 2018: deadline abstract submission (max. 150 words) via https://www.iasc-commons.org/submit-abstract; if you have any questions or problems submitting your abstract, please contact us via [email protected] and the organizers (e-mail.
> March 10, 2018: notification of selected contributors and participants (max. of 25 people)
> May 10, 2018: submission deadline full papers/extended abstracts
> May 20, 2018: papers assigned for written feedback to attendants
> May 30, 2018: publication of program
Organizing team
Sergio Villamayor-Tomás is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Autonomous University of Barcelona. Previously he held lecturing and research positions at Humboldt University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL).
Gustavo García-López is Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Planning, University of Puerto Rico – Rio Piedras. Previously he was a Marie Curie postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Autonomous University of Barcelona, in the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE) project.
Giacomo D’Alisa is a political ecologist at the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra and senior researcher at the Croatian Institute of Political Ecology. Previously, he held a Juan de la Cierva Research Fellowship, and was part of the coordination team of the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE) project, both at ICTA, Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Raphael Cantillana is Graduate student at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Questions and additional information
Please send an e-mail to the organizers:
Funding and Support
The event will be funded by the European Commission’s Marie Curie Research Action program. Funds will cover the IASC registration fee of participants (50 USD per person), coffee and lunches, and the reception diner. Exceptionally, and if funding allows, part of the travel and accommodation costs of participants with limited budget will be covered. Information in this regard will be provided after the selection of abstracts.
PLEASE NOTE: CHANGED DATES! WORKSHOP WILL TAKE PLACE ON JUNE 21-22, 2018
Lead image: Demonstration in the Yaqui valley against a water transfer. Photo and copyright by Sergio Villamayor-Tomas, published by permission.
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