Working together Poteete, Amy R; Janssen, Marco A; Ostrom, Elinor
2010., 20100412, 2010, 2010-04-12, 20100101
eBook
Advances in the social sciences have emerged through a variety of research methods: field-based research, laboratory and field experiments, and agent-based models. However, which research method or ...approach is best suited to a particular inquiry is frequently debated and discussed.Working Togetherexamines how different methods have promoted various theoretical developments related to collective action and the commons, and demonstrates the importance of cross-fertilization involving multimethod research across traditional boundaries. The authors look at why cross-fertilization is difficult to achieve, and they show ways to overcome these challenges through collaboration.
The authors provide numerous examples of collaborative, multimethod research related to collective action and the commons. They examine the pros and cons of case studies, meta-analyses, large-N field research, experiments and modeling, and empirically grounded agent-based models, and they consider how these methods contribute to research on collective action for the management of natural resources. Using their findings, the authors outline a revised theory of collective action that includes three elements: individual decision making, microsituational conditions, and features of the broader social-ecological context.
Acknowledging the academic incentives that influence and constrain how research is conducted,Working Togetherreworks the theory of collective action and offers practical solutions for researchers and students across a spectrum of disciplines.
Climate catastrophe throws into stark relief the extreme, life-threatening inequalities that affect millions of lives worldwide. The poorest and most marginalized, who are least responsible for the ...consumption and emissions that create climate change, are the first and hardest impacted, and the least able to protect themselves. Climate justice is simultaneously a movement, an academic field, an organizing principle, and a political demand. Building climate justice is a matter of life and death. Climate Justice and Participatory Research offers ideas and inspiration for climate justice through the creation of research, knowledge, and livelihood commons and community-based climate resilience. It brings together articulations of the what, why, and how of climate justice through the voices of energetic and motivated scholar-activists who are building alliances across Latin America, Africa, and Canada. Exemplifying socio-ecological transformation through equitable public engagement, these scholars, climate activists, community educators, and teachers come together to share their stories of participatory research and collective action. Grounded in experience and processes that are currently underway, Climate Justice and Participatory Research explores the value of common assets, collective action, environmental protection, and equitable partnerships between local community experts and academic allies. It demonstrates the negative effects of climate-related actions that run roughshod over local communities’ interests and wellbeing, and acknowledges the myriad challenges of participatory research. This is a work committed to the practical work of transforming socio-economies from situations of vulnerability to collective wellbeing.
This Special Issue contributes to the debate on land grabbing as commons grabbing with a special focus on how the development of state institutions (formal laws and regulations for agrarian ...development and compensations) and voluntary corporate social responsibility (CRS) initiatives have enabled the grabbing process. It also looks at how these institutions and CSR programs are used as development strategies of states and companies to legitimate their investments. This Special Issue includes case studies from Kenya, Morocco, Tanzania, Cambodia, Bolivia and Ecuador analysing how these strategies are embedded into neo-liberal ideologies of economic development. We propose looking at James Ferguson’s notion of the Anti-Politics Machine (1990) that served to uncover the hidden political basis of state-driven development strategies. We think it is of interest to test the approach for analysing development discourses and CSR-policies in agrarian investments. We argue based on a New Institutional Political Ecology (NIPE) approach that these legitimize the institutional change from common to state and private property of land and land related common pool resources which is the basis of commons grabbing that also grabbed the capacity for resilience of local people.
In this editorial we assess 50 years' worth of peer-reviewed publications to establish traditions and trends in the study of the commons. Based on this assessment, we provide a sketch of how IJC and ...its editors can continue to contribute to the development of the field. Keywords: International Journal of the Commons, Commons, Common Pool Resources, Bibliographic analysis, scholarship, editorial policy
•Bronze Age pastures, barrow alignments and pastoral mobility co-emerged.•Landscape management and use was mediated by ancestral presence.•‘Ancestral commons’ captures this interconnected nexus.
The ...emergence of open, disturbed grazing landscapes across Early Bronze Age Northern Europe coincided with a boom in the building of monumental barrows, often placed in linear arrangements. The co-emergence of landscape and monument forms suggests an intimate link between cosmology, communities and pasture, which has not featured prominently in prehistoric narratives. We propose and explore a framework of ‘ancestral commons’ to recognize how these landscapes were always both cosmological and practical, with the ancestral presence acting as a key undergirding to potentially fraught issues of grazing rights and maintenance of pasture. We explore specific examples of pastures and linear arrangements of barrows across Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe to explore the institutional entanglements of communities, ancestral infrastructures and landscape forms, such as heathlands. We argue that such complexes were connected to new forms of communities of living and dead, and of landscapes and associated landscape practices, through which a shared sense of the past and ancestral affiliation could be communicated and consolidated.
Despite increasing interest in transnational fields, transnational commons have received little attention. In contrast to economic models of commons, which argue that commons occur naturally and are ...prone to collective inaction and tragedy, we introduce a social constructionist account of commons. Specifically, we show that actor-level frame changes can eventually lead to the emergence of an overarching, hybrid “commons logic” at the field level. These frame shifts enable actors with different logics to reach a working consensus and avoid “tragedies of the commons.” Using a longitudinal analysis of key actors’ logics and frames, we tracked the evolution of the global climate change field over 40 years. We bracketed time periods demarcated by key field-configuring events, documented the different frame shifts in each time period, and identified five mechanisms (collective theorizing, issue linkage, active learning, legitimacy seeking, and catalytic amplification) that underpin how and why actors changed their frames at various points in time—enabling them to move toward greater consensus around a transnational commons logic. In conclusion, the emergence of a commons logic in a transnational field is a nonlinear process and involves satisfying three conditions: (1) key actors view their fates as being interconnected with respect to a problem issue, (2) these actors perceive their own behavior as contributing to the problem, and (3) they take collective action to address the problem. Our findings provide insights for multinational companies, nation-states, nongovernmental organizations, and other stakeholders in both conventional and unconventional commons.
Co-Cities Foster, Sheila R; Iaione, Christian
2022, 2022-12-13
eBook
Open access
A new model of urban governance, mapping the route to a more equitable management of a city's infrastructure and services. The majority of the world's inhabitants live in cities, but even with the ...vast wealth and resources these cities generate, their most vulnerable populations live without adequate or affordable housing, safe water, healthy food, and other essentials. And yet, cities also often harbor the solutions to the inequalities they create, as this book makes clear. With examples drawn from cities worldwide, Co-Cities outlines practices, laws, and policies that are presently fostering innovation in the provision of urban services, spurring collaborative economies as a driver of local sustainable development, and promoting inclusive and equitable regeneration of blighted urban areas. Identifying core elements of these diverse efforts, Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione develop a framework for understanding how certain initiatives position local communities as key actors in the production, delivery, and management of urban assets or local resources. Within this framework, they explain the forms such initiatives increasingly take, like community land trusts, new kinds of co-housing, neighborhood cooperatives, community-shared broadband and energy networks, and new local offices focused on citizen science and civic imagination. The “Co-City” framework is uniquely rooted in the authors' own decades-long research and first-hand experience working in cities around the world. Foster and Iaione offer their observations as “design principles”—adaptable to local context—to help guide further experimentation in building just and self-sustaining urban communities.
In recent years, critical scholarship has drawn attention to increasing power differentials between corporations that use data and people whose data is used. A growing number of scholars see digital ...data and information commons as a way to counteract this asymmetry. In this paper I raise two concerns with this argument: First, because digital data and information can be in more than one place at once, governance models for physical common-pool resources cannot be easily transposed to digital commons. Second, not all data and information commons are suitable to address power differentials. In order to create digital commons that effectively address power asymmetries we must pay more systematic attention to the issue of exclusion from digital data and information commons. Why and how digital data and information commons exclude, and what the consequences of such exclusion are, decide whether commons can change power asymmetries or whether they are more likely to perpetuate them.
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![Celebrating the 30[sup.th] ...](http://api.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/image/issn/XR4PS5YY4K/1875-0281/small "Celebrating the 30[sup.th] Anniversary of Ostrom's Governing the Commons: Traditions and Trends in the Study of the Commons, Revisited")
