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ORGANIZERS

Onshirin Regional Public Organization

Research Institute for Humanity and Nature

International Association for the Study of the Commons

REGISTRATION OFFICE

c/o Convention Linkage, Inc.
Sanbancho KS Bldg.
2 Sanbancho, Chiyoda-ku
Tokyo 102-0075, Japan
Phone: +81-3-3263-8695
Fax: +81-3-3263-8693
Email: info@iasc2013.org

SUB-THEMES

1. Commons and Social Capital for Livelihood Security in Crisis

Smoothly-functioning commons go hand in hand with substantial reserves of social capital, but the ultimate test of that social capital is whether it can serve the community in a time of crisis. Does social capital help with sharing sacrifice as well as with sharing benefits of cooperative effort? Traditionally, many commons functioned to provide backup during disaster -- do the physical resources of the commons provide emergency sustenance and relief for communities? Do communities exposed over a long historical record to frequent difficulties (severe bouts of economic hardship, highly variable climate, monsoons and droughts, or even a high rate of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions) develop skills at cooperation and community-building more frequently than other societies? Do such skills emerge in the form of robust commons and/or high levels of social capital? Conversely, what is the impact of these difficulties on the commons?

2. Commercialization and the Commons

Many, though certainly not all, commons were traditionally managed to support subsistence living, and the arrival of commercial demand for sale of products from the commons to buyers beyond the community placed pressure on the commons. Yet the potential profit from sales could also be an incentive to protect rather than mine the commons in order to generate sustainable flows of such income well into the future. The contradictory evidence on this point demands historical and comparative investigation. When does commercial pressure stimulate the formation and careful management of commons? When does commercial pressure undermine sustainable extraction and lead to overharvesting that can destroy the commons? Are there differences between “manageable” types of commercial demand and “unacceptable” types? Are there defensive strategies that communities can adopt to manage demand and the temptation to overharvest in the ace of these strong external pressures? Can we draw lessons from new commons to apply to tangible resource commons, or vice versa? How does commercial demand for genetic resources post special challenges with respect to governance, risk, and ethics?

3. Urban Commons

We can think of urban commons in two ways – first, we might see urban infrastructure and networks of waterways, sewers, electricity grids, and transportation as commons that are shared, knowingly or otherwise, by urban citizens. Think of the circulatory or lymphatic systems in the human body – these do their work, operating as intact systems, whether we know or observe this work or not, yet they require care and maintenance, and their performance is a joint result of all contributions to quality and performance. Second, urban areas contain in their midst smaller well-defined commons, both physical and social, from neighborhood parks and community centers to neighborhood associations and homeowner associations. How are urban commons governed? Why is there a trend toward “private urban governance” in some countries? How does past experience in other commons affect the ability of urbanites to develop new urban commons?

4. Collisions in Law and Culture

We typically see many difficult conflicts between indigenous people and states, between village custom and formal state law, between indigenous concepts of property rights and resource knowledge and newer or foreign or imported ideas about rights and resources. How has the collision between traditional or historically-rooted notions of resources and ownership, and promoters of new “modern” (?) institutions and modes of economic production affected transformations on the commons? How do communities that do not have a traditional concept we might call “ownership” achieve recognition of their claims when negotiating with governments that have very different concepts of resources and ownership? What new legal forms have been created to accommodate rights to the commons? What is the impact of these various new legal forms on use and protection of the commons during economic modernization? What does “modernization” of rights turn out to mean – does it vacate, weaken, or strengthen these rights?

5. Mobile Resources and Fluid Spaces

Mobile resources, whether visible or invisible, aquatic or land-based, tangible or digital, pose special problems for managing the commons. The physical expanse occupied by migratory animals (birds, fish, grazers) can change over time and can even be invisible. Herders must move their herds in order to tread “lightly” on available grazing lands, so mobility is crucial to the survival of most pastoralists. How can resource users secure rights to resources that must move? How do we overlap systems of mobile use through open space on top of systems with fixed boundaries? How do we manage monitoring and enforcement when resources are mobile or the spaces in which they move are themselves fluid or intangible?

6. Equity and Distributive Justice within the Commons

Communities managing their commons differ a great deal in their internal arrangements to make decisions, divide benefits, apportion labor, and choose leaders. Some opt for direct democracy, some delegate decisions to a few representatives, some have “bosses,” and some practice strict equality. Often with “modernization” comes an externally-driven push to create uniformity among and even within different communities. What can we learn from deep historical analysis about why some commons regimes develop internal hierarchy and a “boss” system of local elites while others do not? Over time, what seems to be the basis of the leaders’ legitimacy in hierarchical regimes? What different historical conditions drive other communities to practice internal democracy or to opt for egalitarian distribution of benefits and duties? What is the impact on community cohesion of different distribution rules? What is the impact of asymmetries within the collectivity on the group’s ability to cooperate, on its ability to get the group’s work done, on members’ sense of fairness? How do different communities define internal distributive justice? Are there noticeable trends over historical time in how commons communities function internally? Is there a relationship between how communities function internally and how they relate to higher authority? Are groups with “bosses” more easily co-opted than egalitarian groups, or does having an internal elite provide a bulwark against assault from the outside?

7. State-Society Relations and the Protest Politics of Commons

Very few common property regimes emerge without considerable struggle over historic time by the commoners to convert their claims into more robust rights. They may have to deal with invaders from other areas and with governments that might prefer to nationalize resources or to grant concessions from the commons to their supporters. We are reminded by the story of Kita Fuji, as well as by Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, of the important role that protest plays in changing outcomes. Local and national governments may interfere with commons management in several ways – aiming to confiscate the resource, seeing the resource as government property so demanding royalties on extraction of resources, attempting to limit the autonomy of communities managing the resource, or even wanting to interfere in relationships within communities as they manage the commons (perhaps claiming the right to appoint leaders, veto decisions, set up preferred decision-making arrangements, or allocate benefits from the commons). How do state-commons or state-community relationships affect management of the resource, community survival, economic and environmental outcomes? Under what conditions do communities bargain successfully with states? What conditions produce co-management, and under what circumstances do communities find co-management to be an acceptable outcome?

8. Commons and Complexity

Commons that (i) are physically large, (ii) involve many people, (iii) generate an assortment of common-pool goods with varying attributes or produced over different scales, and (iv) collide or overlap with multiple layers of formal government are so complex that they elude our understanding. How do we simultaneously manage resources with different traits in the same space? How do nested commons function? Are there effective and ineffective ways to organize this nesting? Is multi-level governance for complex commons at multiple scales efficient or effective? What are the options available when problems arise with multi-level governance? Does multi-layered governance for complex commons multiply points of conflict and total difficulty, or does this layering displace and even mitigate conflict?

9. Commons as Local Energy Sources and Carbon Storage affecting Climate Change

Our need to sequester more carbon and burn less of it and to conserve energy often leads to calls for reduced transportation of fuel and materials and tighter connections between production and consumption. Do resource commons offer a way to localize solutions and enhance sustainability? Can commons serve as local sources of biofuels and electricity co-generation, as renewable sources of other materials, and as local destinations for waste? Since global results are simply the sum of local effort and local results, we need to subdivide global goals into local efforts that can be monitored. Can commons serve as the venue for monitoring and enforcing local limits on fuel use, conservation, and emissions to enable us to achieve globally desirable results in climate change? Does our need to build local contributions to global goals mean that we really need to be reviving communities and commons as front-line environmental managers for a planet in jeopardy?

Global Commons

Global commons like the oceans and the atmosphere are well-recognized even if not well understood, but new global commons emerge all the time along with our changing definition and appreciation of what is a resource. We encourage proposals on global commons but particularly want to highlight the following three challenging areas in which the very character and distribution of the resources, what we find useful and valuable about them, and the size of the community with an interest in these resources are moving incredibly fast.

10. The Global Digital Commons

New technologies have created completely new resources (from radio waves to geostationary orbits to bandwidth) for which we are struggling to create appropriate institutional arrangements. Some of these technologies have rapidly converted resources that used to be the monopoly of powerful elites into information readily available around the globe (digital information traveling via the internet), so that a child holding a smart phone now has access to more information than all that the intelligence services of the world’s superpowers could muster just two decades ago. The debate over intellectual property – the ownership of information and cultural production – is vigorous and heated. How can humans cope with knowledge, information, proprietary knowledge and technology, so as to promote innovation, preserve valuable knowledge, and gain the greatest available social (planetary) benefit from information?

11. Biodiversity and Genetic Resources as Commons

We are becoming more keenly appreciative of genetic resources (both genomes and species) that were not “owned” in any classic sense before by anyone but have now become valuable and subject to contestation and claims by many. How do we manage the “biodiversity commons”? How do we conserve genetic resources and species? What institutional arrangements can be created to govern the production and sale of new genetic material through genetically modified organisms?

12. Cultural Commons with Non-Consumptive Uses

Cultural resources of certain types are as endangered as species –cultural production like language, folklore, and historical memory of dwindling populations -- but are also of interest and value not only to the dwindling populations that created them but to all of us. And other cultural resources that were once thought to be quite appropriately the personal property of a narrow elite (the Taj Mahal, the Forbidden City in Beijing, the funeral pyramids at Giza) are now claimed by millions and even billions as their heritage too. Viewscapes, landscapes and ecosystem habitat that we want not only for wildlife to live in but to see ourselves; cultural production like language and music, belief systems of indigenous knowledge and cultural rituals and festivals; historically and culturally precious components of the built environment, natural and human-made world heritage sites – all of these are commons that we increasingly value for non-consumptive uses. How can we create arrangements to protect these commons – very old, but newly appreciated by a wider global community? Under what conditions are governance arrangements for non-consumptive use effective at conserving this global heritage? Are our uses of these resources really non-consumptive or non-subtractable?

13. Campaigning On the Commons: Practical Lessons and Strategy

Commoners, researchers, and other observers have many years of experience from which we can now distill lessons about practical methods and strategies for dealing with the political environment surrounding a commons. Under what conditions do various methods prove successful or faulty? When are campaigns for the commons effective? What tactics help and what tactics put commons campaigns at risk? What are the pitfalls the commons campaigners encounter? How do campaigns for the commons resemble or differ from other kinds of campaigning and activism? How do political and social contexts affect which strategies work well?

14. Advancing research on the commons: methods, comparable data, and theoretical research frontiers

What has been the relationship in the past between theoretical advances and empirical information about the commons? How do the qualities of the resource itself -- fugitive or stationary, subtractable or non-rival, self-reproducing (wildlife) or not (historical monuments) – affect the institutions we need for managing these resources? Our theory must become intimately conversant with these distinctions in order to develop effective and efficient institutional designs. Game theoretic understandings of cooperation and free-riders underlie most work on the commons by explaining the fundamental dilemma, but how can game theoretic analysis and formal modeling offer additional insights? How have laboratory experiments, on cooperation or other issues, advanced the study of the commons, and what additional contributions can this approach offer? How have the resources of the digital age – the information commons! – be used to promote advances in the study of other commons? How can our studies of individual cases be cumulated as the foundation for generalizations and theory-building? In what areas can the study of commons advance social science theory, and conversely in what ways can existing theory from the social sciences improve the way we study the commons?