September 22, 2022

Encountering the commons in The Pluriverse of Eco-social Justice: From Coimbra and beyond

By Anoushka Zoob Carter. Both the Livros Carteneros movement and the Baldios are examples of everyday commons-making beyond a neoliberal capitalist society. They offer alternatives to privatisation and neoliberal individualisation, and help us to imagine the pluriverse in practice.
October 12, 2021

Dune and the Inhuman Agency of Commoning

By Riccardo Buonanno. The new sci-fi epic Dune is a planetary narrative. Human affairs only represent a part of a whole geopower, in which Planet’s forces organize, incite and deform social and political relations. Is it time to reconsider our certainties on the human agency facing environmental crisis?
May 27, 2021

Commoning through blogging: Reflections on our “Reimagining, remembering and recommoning water” series

By Irene Leonardelli, Gustavo García López and Emanuele Fantini. In two webinars at the IASC 2021 Water Commons Virtual Conference (19-21 May 2021), past and future contributors reflected on the joint UndEnv-FLOWs series “Reimagining, remembering, and reclaiming water: From extractivism to commoning”.
April 9, 2021

How imaginaries shift in places: Native and settler politics of water and salmon

By Cleo Woelfle-Erskine. The latest installment of the series “Reimagining, remembering, and reclaiming water” discusses how new eco-cultural imaginaries can emerge from alliances for river restoration between ranchers-conservationists, salmon scientists, and Tribal natural resource staff. 
January 19, 2021

Rooted Water Democracies and Water Justice 

By Jeroen Vos and Rutgerd Boelens. Transnational water movements often mutually complement with place-based forms of collective water management. This may enhance grounded and equitable water provision, and shape political advocacy of common resources control at multiple scales.
October 15, 2020

From the commons to extractivism and back: The Story of Mahakam River in Indonesia

By Siti Maimunah and Sarah Agustiorini Increasing pressures from extractive industries on the Mahakam River in Kalimantan,  the second largest river in Indonesia, risk an irreparable destruction of a commons. Yet residents are actively organizing to reclaim the river as a common living space, as Siti Maimunah and Sarah Agustiorini illustrate in this new post of the series “Reimagining, remembering, and reclaiming water: from extractivism to commoning”.
August 18, 2020

A swimming commons

By Elliot Hurst. The summer episode of the series “Reimagining, remembering, and reclaiming water: from extractivism to commoning” co-organized by the Undisciplined Environments and FLOWs blogs, explores swimming as a political act to reclaim social and ecological justice.
July 21, 2020

Scaling-up territorial alternatives to water extractivism: Mini hydroelectric plants in Ecuador

By Emilie Dupuits In the second post of series “Reimagining, remembering, and reclaiming water: From extractivism to commoning” ,co-organized by the Undisciplined Environments and FLOWs blogs, Emilie Dupuits discusses controversies and challenges in scaling-up social struggles for water conservation and sustainable livelihoods in the Intag Valley, Ecuador.
May 8, 2020

Life as Commons

By Stavros Stavrides  The coronavirus pandemic crisis has triggered a new wave of collective practices that gesture towards the same necessity as the “squares movement” (including the Arab Spring, the Indignados and the Occupy movements): another form of social organization is urgently needed.
October 6, 2017

Are there alternative trajectories of technological development? A political ecology perspective

by Vasilis Kostakis* Alternative technological systems could develop through the confluence of digital commons, peer-to-peer relations and local manufacturing capacity – but we need the integration of a political ecology perspective to face and overcome the challenges this transition implies Humans do not control modern technology: the technological system has colonized their imagination and it shapes their activities and relations. This statement reflects the thought of influential degrowth scholars, like Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich. Ellul believed that humans may control individual technologies, but not […]
September 20, 2017

Commons and Contradictions: The Political Ecology of Elinor Ostrom

By Derek Wall* Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) won a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for her work on the commons.  Her work is hugely inspiring but difficult to fit into established categorized. Some political ecologists have criticized her as too conservative or managerial. Here, I will attempt here to outline why, despite these criticisms, I feel Ostrom is a key thinker for political ecologists, and how her work relates to other approaches to political ecology. Born in Los Angeles, she studied politics and then became […]
August 11, 2016

Political ecologies of enclosures and commoning in Mexico's forests

The experience of Mexico, a global pioneer in community forestry, highlights the possibilities and challenges of commons as alternative forms of more just and sustainable socio-ecological regimes.*