Panel 1.5. Challenges and Opportunities for Mountain Commons and Communities

The Himalayas mountains geographically encompass Nepal and Bhutan and parts of India, Pakistan, and China. The Himalayas, referred to as the water tower of Asia, is a crucial ecological and geological asset for billions of people in South Asia that provides ecosystem services to the mountain as well as downstream populations in terms of food, energy, water, medicines, and tourism among others. However, with rising environmental change, it is increasingly becoming vulnerable to disasters including landslides, earthquakes, unbalanced river flows, glacier melt, and air pollution.

Since it is a heavily politicized and militarised region, with states embroiled in complex border and political disputes, the security perspective in the region has been dominated by the military and political sectors in terms of traditional border disputes between the countries leading to mutual distrust. Non-traditional security threats including environmental insecurities like climate change, and water-food-energy insecurities have been recognized as a challenge but remain at the periphery of the security discourse. However, the countries have yet to be able to devise a regional effort toward addressing them. As a result, there is an emerging “security complex” in the Himalayas' environmental sector, leading to complex security interdependence amongst the countries.

Since, the environment as an issue has remained at the periphery of regional discourse, the paper seeks to discuss the challenges and opportunities that the Himalayas witness in terms of securitizing the environment and governing the mountain system. Contrary to other mountain regions like the Alps and the Carpathians, the region has not been able to develop an effective way of governance. It discusses, the environmental insecurities in the region and how they are forming into a security complex of its own in the environmental sector. Furthermore, it discusses challenges and opportunities in governing the mountain system of the Himalayas. Moreover, it draws a comparison of the Himalayan mountains and other mountains like the Alps in terms of regional governance. Lastly, it discusses the prospects and scope for securitizing and effective governance of the Himalayan mountains.

Fire is a crucial tool for tropical subsistence agriculture, but without proper control, it can lead to unintended wildfires. Through a combination of agricultural calendars, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews with over 60 farmers during four months of fieldwork in the Peruvian Andes, we evaluated current agricultural burning practices. Quechua farmers utilize fire to clear agricultural residue, manage weeds and shrubs, and prepare new or fallow land, mostly during the dry season. They demonstrate an understanding of fire behavior shaped by fuel, topography, and weather conditions, paralleling Western controlled burn practices. Despite this, escaped fires are common, though most are managed within an hour, with few requiring broader community intervention. Adaptation to changing fire risks is already underway, as farmers adjust their burning practices in response to evolving legal, communal, and environmental conditions. This study highlights the need for governments to support, rather than suppress, fire use by offering modern wildfire risk tools and technical assistance, aligning with farmers' existing knowledge and the challenges posed by increasing flammability in highland landscapes. These findings advocate for adaptive fire management approaches that can be applied in mountain regions and diverse settings across the Global South.

Until mid-last century, extensive farming systems in Portuguese mountainous areas relied on common land, the baldios, mostly used for grazing and for gathering livelihoods. These resources were used and managed jointly by the villagers, according to locally created institutions. In the following years, several socioeconomic and political events contributed to the gradual distancing of people from their lands. For instances, the cattle and the woods were replaced by monocultures of pine trees, as part of a national project that aimed to turn baldios into productive territories for the whole nation. As an alternative to the harsh life conditions, from the 1960’s on, people fled from rural areas to the cities and abroad.
In 1974, with democracy reinstated, baldios were formally returned to the peoples, within a legal framework, revised last time in 2017. That year was also marked by the occurrence of the most destructive rural fires ever registered in Portugal. Following the catastrophe, public institutions lost credibility in the forest matters and conditions were gathered for a paradigm shift. In this context, in 2019 the Government launched a pilot-project aiming to group baldios and encourage cooperation between scarcely populated communities and thus boost local forest management.
So far 19 groups of baldios were created and a second project round aims to create 10 more. We look at the process of grouping baldios by focusing on two cases, one in the centre, where fire destroyed part of the forest, and the other in the north. Differences in the starting conditions of each group led to completely different outputs and perspectives, highlighting the gap between centrally designed public policies and its adequacy to territorial conditions. We conclude that despite depopulation, there is ground for baldios’ local management, however diversity among the baldios needs to be considered and allowed when policy is put into practice.

Recent discoveries of important lithium deposits in Peru suggest that the lithium boom in South America’s Altiplano is expanding. Along with salt flats in the ‘lithium Triangle’ of Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia, which share 55% of the world's reserves, in Peru, lithium is found in the world’s biggest tropical glacial (Quelcaya) and within the ancestral territory of peasant communities. In this context, this article contributes to discussions about just energy transitions and lithium extraction by exploring the new case of Peru as a potential global lithium producer, an economic and geopolitical goal strongly promoted by state authorities. Some scholars have focused on the diverse discursive strategies and imaginaries of state officials in Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia to promote lithium exploitation as a sustainable kind of extractivism that supports the energy transition (Voskoboynik and Andreucci 2021; Barandiarán 2018). Others have delved into how the grassroots mobilizes contested lithium discourses and imaginaries that shape overlapping territorialities and a revalorization of “the indigenous” (Dorn & Gundermann 2022; Soto and Newell 2022) or even conceive lithium as a socioecological and ontologically contested entity that sustains and participates in complex webs of life-supporting, place-based, and more-than-human relations (Quevedo 2023). These dynamics show how similar narratives are invoked to justify divergent paths of action depending on the different interests and temporalities of the actors involved (Carrasco et al. 2023). Considering the relevance of grasping these differences, this study relies on semi-structured interviews with national and sub-national state officials and regional indigenous organizations and fieldwork with peasant communities in the areas of two lithium projects in Puno, Peru. Unlike previous contributions, the article distinguishes between lithium discourses, imaginaries, and ontologies and unravels the spaces of contestation and articulations that shape the material possibilities of lithium extraction in a new extractive frontier.

Mexican forests host a wide biodiversity and provide invaluable environmental benefits, but still today in the middle of water shortages and wide deforestation, they are only valued in limited ways. According with the IPES findings on the relevance of local and indigenous communities in forest conservation, those forests best preserved and more resilient in Mexico are owned and managed by communities.
Over the last four decades an important number of community forestry initiatives aroused, maintaining forest areas, creating local employment, forest governance, investing in local public goods, creating technical abilities for forest protection and informed perspectives on the value forest ecosystems, that often merged with traditional visions and knowledge. These initiatives gained international, more than national, recognition including the certification for good forest management by the Forest Stewardship Council of 90 communities. These abilities are especially important regarding climate change and the growing presence of droughts, forest fires and pests.
Despite its achievements, community forestry has been largely disregarded by public policies, that on the contrary have imposed an unfair fiscal treatment, favoring export agriculture and mining in forest regions. During the federal administration 2018-2024, forest and environmental policies suffered cuts of around 70%, while criminal groups gained control of many forest regions and illegal logging reached 66% of the forest extractions. Meanwhile communal forest activities are over-regulated, even criminalized. Not surprisingly, the area under forest management lowered, and deforestation reached 250,000 has in 2022.
During 2024 we did fieldwork in 7 different regions, aiming to document and understand the commoning responses of forest communities to these complex conditions. Among them we found few, but meaningful community efforts for peace keeping; regional associations for joint forest industrial projects; development of new silvicultural methods; national groups aiming to gain political influence. We also found new productive projects of certified honey and coffee, quality furniture and ecotourism, as well as widespread commoning in defense of the lands against mining and infrastructure projects.
Our results show that despite this very adverse contex, commoning is present and vibrant in many forest regions, even more, it has proved to be the most viable way to preserve forest commons against the pressures created by the Antrhopocene and neoliberalism.

The growing entanglement of small farmers with Global Value Chains (GVCs) has heightened their market vulnerability, a situation further aggravated by the alarming increase in extreme weather events in the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand, India. Erratic climatic patterns, characterized by fluctuations in rainfall leading to flash floods and droughts, have inflicted significant damage on agricultural land, disrupted cropping cycles, and threatened the viability of community-based smallholder farming systems. Fieldwork conducted in 2020-21 indicated that erratic monsoonal rains triggered flash floods and landslides, resulting in extensive devastation across various districts in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand. This destruction, compounded by subsequent drought-like conditions, resulted in widespread crop failures, underscoring farmers' vulnerability to climate-induced shocks.
Inconsistent and inadequate state support has further exposed farmers to the harsh impacts of these climatic extremes. Small farmers—particularly women and those with limited landholdings—are disproportionately affected, often lacking access to formal safety nets. Many have incurred significant debt to cover rising production costs, which have become increasingly unsustainable. The reliance on labor-intensive and input-heavy agricultural practices associated with GVCs has deepened their financial precarity. For some, the combined pressures of climate change and declining agricultural viability have led to migration to nearby urban centers in search of alternative livelihoods.
This paper draws on field observations and interviews conducted in the aftermath of these extreme weather events to examine how the intersection of GVC dependency, climate volatility, and uneven state support exacerbates the socio-economic vulnerabilities of small farmers. By addressing the gendered and structural dimensions of these challenges, I argue that frequent extreme weather events are deepening socio-economic inequalities and transforming agrarian livelihoods within the ecologically fragile Himalayan region.

Globally, integration into market economies and state governance systems offer both opportunities and challenges for rural, resource-dependent communities. While improved connectivity and access to trans-local goods, technologies, knowledge, and markets have expanded life choices, the long-term resilience of communities — historically supported by non-market systems of production and exchange and collectively held identities, knowledge, and resources — may be undermined by externally led developmental projects, internalization of hierarchical narratives, and erosion of place-based knowledge transmission.

Against this backdrop, this paper presents a grassroots initiative to revitalize mountain-based production systems and associated ways of life in contemporary contexts. Amidst rapid sociocultural and economic changes in rural China over recent decades, a family from Queniao, a Miao village located in the Leigong Mountain Nature Reserve in southeastern Guizhou, has undertaken a series of agritourism and conservation projects to sustain and adapt local ways of life. Distinguished by their autonomy-centered, sustainability-driven, and co-creative characteristics, these projects embody “biocultural design” — a concept that acknowledges Indigenous and local contributions to sustainable practices and promotes endogenous innovation through iterative and mutually beneficial linkages between local and exogenous elements.

Drawing on ethnographic research into the knowledge, networks, meanings, and everyday practices underpinning these projects, this paper aims to corroborate and advance a relational conceptualization of commons — not as isolated systems of economic resource extraction, but as non-commodified, multidimensional systems of social reproduction rooted in collective memories, relationships, and values, constantly affecting and affected by broader political and economic processes. It also highlights efforts to facilitate mutual understanding and egalitarian collaboration as processes of commoning, widening the scope for actions and interventions towards sustainability goals.

Seventy percent of the land in the town of Leitza in the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Iberia is held in common by all the citizens of Leitza. The landscape of this mountain valley has been a commons, as the commoners say, “since time immemorial.: The Law of Commons regulates the use of pasture, forests, farmland, hunting blinds, and other common goods. This panel looks not only at the effectiveness of the commons as sustainable for resource management, but just as important at the effect of the law on the valley’s ecology. Preservation of the land has helped preserve Basque cultural practices like competitive axe cutting and annual bird hunts. It has also maintained a large collection of ancient beech and oak trees, many of which were once pollarded. The survival of this landscape now has attracted an international community to study and practice the preservation and revitalization of these ancient woodlands. In addition, citizens of Leitza have used common land to create a new arboretum. We will contrast this township with several in nearby Gipuzkoa, where such land types were largely converted to conifer plantations.

The panel will analyze the Laws of the Commons in Leitza, tracking changes in the law over time. It will assess and review the effect of the law on restraining ecologically damaging uses of the land, and will look at how the law in enforced. Above all, it will examine the cultural and ecological value of a system that makes all the citizens watchful over the character and health of the place where they live. It will look at how international participation on the land has not vitiated the place of this commons, but rather informed and enlarged its ability to preserve and renew the forests and fields.