The Drama Of The Commons

The "tragedy of the commons" is a central concept in human ecology and the study of the environment. It has had tremendous value for stimulating research, but it only describes the reality of human-environment interactions in special situations. Research over the past thirty years has helped clarify how human motivations, rules governing access to resources, the structure of social organizations, and the resource systems themselves interact to determine whether or not the many dramas of the commons end happily. In this book, leaders in the field review the evidence from several disciplines and many lines of research and present a state-of-the-art assessment. They summarize lessons learned and identify the major challenges facing any system of governance for resource management. They also highlight the major challenges for the next decade: making knowledge development more systematic; understanding institutions dynamically; considering a broader range of resources (such as global and technological commons); and taking into account the effects of social and historical context. This book will be a valuable and accessible introduction to the field for students and a resource for advanced researchers.

The "tragedy of the commons" is a central concept in human ecology and the study of the environment. It has had tremendous value for stimulating research, but it only describes the reality of human-environment interactions in special situations. Research over the past thirty years has helped clarify how human motivations, rules governing access to resources, the structure of social organizations, and the resource systems themselves interact to determine whether or not the many dramas of the commons end happily. In this book, leaders in the field review the evidence from several disciplines and many lines of research and present a state-of-the-art assessment. They summarize lessons learned and identify the major challenges facing any system of governance for resource management. They also highlight the major challenges for the next decade: making knowledge development more systematic; understanding institutions dynamically; considering a broader range of resources (such as global and technological commons); and taking into account the effects of social and historical context. This book will be a valuable and accessible introduction to the field for students and a resource for advanced researchers.

Protest, Property and the Commons focuses on the alternative property narratives of ‘social centres’, or political squats, and how the spaces and their communities create their own – resistant – form of law. Drawing on critical legal theory, legal pluralism, legal geography, poststructuralism and new materialism, the book considers how protest movements both use state law and create new, more informal, legalities in order to forge a practice of resistance. Invaluable for anyone working within the area of informal property in land, commons, protest and adverse possession, this book offers a ground-breaking account of the integral role of time, space and performance in the instituting processes of law and resistance.

This book develops a theory of climate cooperation designed for concerted action, which emphasises the role and function of collectives in achieving shared climate goals. In debates on climate change action, research focuses on three major goals: on mitigation, on adaptation and on transformation. Even though these goals are accepted, concerted action is still difficult to realize. Climate Justice and Collective Action provides an analysis of why this is the case and develops a theory of climate cooperation designed to overcome the existing roadblocks. Angela Kallhoff starts with a thorough analysis of failures of collective action in the context of climate change action. Taking inspiration from theories of water cooperation, she then establishes a theory of joint action that reframes climate goals as shared goals and highlights the importance of adhering to principles of fairness. This also includes an exploration of the normative claims working in the background of climate cooperation. Finally, Kallhoff puts forward proposals for a fair allocation of duties to cooperate with respect to climate goals. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate action, climate justice, environmental sociology and environmental philosophy and ethics more broadly.

With an emphasis on the challenges of sustaining the commons across local to global scales, Making Commons Dynamic examines the empirical basis of theorising the concepts of commonisation and decommonisation as a way to understand commons as a process and offers analytical directions for policy and practice that can potentially help maintain commons as commons in the future. Focusing on commonisation–decommonisation as an analytical framework useful to examine and respond to changes in the commons, the chapter contributions explore how natural resources are commonised and decommonised through the influence of multi-level internal and external drivers, and their implications for commons governance across disparate geographical and temporal contexts. It draws from a large number of geographically diverse empirical cases – 20 countries in North, South, and Central America and South- and South-East Asia. They involve a wide range of commons – related to fisheries, forests, grazing, wetlands, coastal-marine, rivers and dams, aquaculture, wildlife, tourism, groundwater, surface freshwater, mountains, small islands, social movements, and climate. The book is a transdisciplinary endeavour with contributions by scholars from geography, history, sociology, anthropology, political studies, planning, human ecology, cultural and applied ecology, environmental and development studies, environmental science and technology, public policy, Indigenous/tribal studies, Latin American and Asian studies, and environmental change and governance, and authors representing the commons community, NGOs, and policy. Contributors include academics, community members, NGOs, practitioners, and policymakers. Therefore, commonisation–decommonisation lessons drawn from these chapters are well suited for contributing to the practice, policy, and theory of the commons, both locally and globally.

Property and Community fills a major gap in the legal literature on property and its relationship to community. The essays included differ from past discussions, including those provided by law-and-economics, by providing richer accounts of community. By and large, prior discussions by property theorists treat communities as agglomerations of individuals and eschew substantive accounts of justice, favoring what Charles Taylor has called "procedural" conceptions. These perspectives on ownership obscure the possibility that the "community" might have a moral status that differs from neighboring owners or from non-owning individuals. This book examines a variety of social practices that implicate community in its relationship to property. These practices range from more obvious property-based communities like Israeli kibbutzim to surprising examples such as queues. Aspects of law and community in relationship to legal and social institutions both inside and outside of the United States are discussed. Alexander and Peñalver seek to mediate the distance between abstract theory and mundane features of daily life to provide a rich, textured treatment of the relationship between law and community. Instead of defining community in abstractly theoretical terms, they approach the subject through the lens of concrete institutions and social practices. In doing so, they not only enrich our empirical understanding of the relationship between property and community but also provide important insights into the concept of community itself.