Panel 2.2. Commoning in response to climate change

This paper examines the opportunities and challenges that place-based informal governance networks encounter in supporting coastal communities facing climate-related hazards and their impacts. Coastal communities in the eastern US are enduring increasing impacts from hazards related to climate change, such as tropical cyclones, unprecedented winter storms, and sea level rise. While federal and state-agencies provide funding to address some of these impacts, community members are often left without government support if their losses or the hazards themselves fall outside of government defined thresholds and descriptors. This paper examines the informal networks that have emerged following climate-related storm events in three coastal communities: Biloxi, MS; Bath, ME; and Rockland, ME. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews with community leaders (e.g., representatives of non-governmental organizations, faith-based organizations, municipal-level civil servants, etc.), participant observation at community meetings, and document collection of local media coverage, it reveals how informal processes of resource and service provision emerged. Findings demonstrate challenges that these networks encounter in meeting the diverse needs of community members, particularly those that have been historically marginalized (e.g., immigrant community members). Yet, these emergent networks also present unique opportunities for enhancing support, such as their flexibility, long-standing community relationships, and capacity to access information and respond to needs swiftly. This research highlights the critical roles that informal, often under-resourced, networks play in addressing coastal community impacts from climate hazards.

Given calls to decolonise engagement with Indigenous communities, this article explores how allied researchers can participate in self-determined learning with Indigenous Peoples. Drawing on over a decade of experience within an action-research collective in a Mapuche context, the authors suggest that allied researchers can accompany Indigenous-led co-design in a manner that not only strengthens genuine Indigenous participation but also fosters mutual and collective learning from within the co-creative processes themselves. Lake Budi, a biocultural hotspot in the Pacific coast of Northern Patagonia, Chile, is a coastal wetland habitat for hundreds of endemic and migratory species and the ancestral homeland for the Mapuche-Lafkenche (∼15,000) who, through grassroots learning, are determining practical steps towards restoring their territory, its commons and their self-governance for kvmemongen. This Mapuche concept refers broadly to enacting forms of living well together, humans and non-humans. As allied participants in a Mapuche-led codesign collective since 2013, in this paper, we focus on exploring key “moments of mutual learning” within this longer-than-usual co-design process towards land-based community-based economic and environmental governance tools. Each of these moments involved collective learning that required interaction and feedback loops across diverse areas of expertise, made possible over longer and flexible rhythms and periods. Tools, protocols, and methods gradually take shape in such a process through mutual learning opportunities provided by relationship building, cultural immersion, community-led protocols, decision-making, and evaluation mechanisms. This work suggests a new understanding of the involvement of allied researchers in Indigenous-led co-design as an emerging and increasingly relevant form of grassroots mutual learning toward indigenous climate resilience through self-governed regenerative economies.

Biocultural restoration as a response to climate change from within Indigenous Peoples' territories, requires an intercultural-critical understanding of the past and present dynamics of degradation and fragmentation affecting them, as well as those of self-governance and recovery of social-ecological systems, in their heterogeneous and complex interactions with one another. Based on demand from the Ayllarewe Budi, a Mapuche-Lafkenche ancestral territory and biocultural refuge extending over hundres of miles of coastal marshlands south of the Nahuelbuta mountain range in Southern Chile, this collaborative research project is being codesigned and conducted adaptively, at the intersection of micro-historical reconstruction, the analysis of environmental governance, and decolonizing environmental knowledge through ontological dialogues with territorial knowledge agents. The temporal-spatial focus of this project, the Ayllarewe Budi, as well as the broader Mapuche territory, Wallmapu, were self-sufficient and self-governed until the late 19th century. A century and a half of radical transformations in the land, brought about by the imposition of internal colonialism and then modernization, were responded to, not only by resistance against being incorporated into modern-colonial ontology, but also by a resurgent and creative Mapuche world in ongoing recomposition. The environmental dimension of these processes, in the case of Budi, is reflected through a wealth of historic and environmental sources, as well as its still-living oral history, that are yet to be integrated in a micro-historical narrative. This research, although historical in perspective, it is also prospective, as it aims to identify commons as “objects” for biocultural restoration, on the basis of historical-environmental dialogue of knowledge, and position them from within, as social-ecological restoration objects towards emerging polycentric environmental governance, led by the Ayllarewe Budi and other vulnerable coastal areas of the Global South. However, such co-production also involves continuous inter-reflexion on the coloniality of environmental knowledge, through a genuinely horizontal dialogue that recognizes the radical diversity, and at the same time, equal standing, of indigenous knowledge systems.

An extensive scholarship on water commons explores the provision, use, and sustainability of freshwater. However, freshwater commons (rivers, lakes, floodplains, among others) are also sites of critically important food systems – fisheries and aquaculture – which are increasingly affected by climate change. To understand climate change experiences in these freshwater food commons, we conducted 32 semi-structured interviews with key informants who have expertise in diverse freshwater food systems in 20 different countries. The interviews explored climate change hazards, impacts, and adaptations, as well as the social, economic, and environmental contexts in which they play out. The results demonstrate that, while there are some similarities with climate change experiences in marine and coastal fisheries and aquaculture, the ways in which climate change affects freshwater food commons is uniquely shaped by the historical and current governance of freshwater proper, to which commons scholarship has traditionally attended. For example, in many cases, climate change impacts on the food security and livelihoods of actors in freshwater fisheries and aquaculture cannot be understood separately from the histories of exclusion, marginalization, and environmental degradation associated with the development of dams for hydropower or irrigation. Efforts to disentangle the additive, multiplicative, and even moderating effects of climate change vis-à-vis other drivers are not only analytically fraught but also politically charged. Adding to the complexity, freshwater food systems are intricately linked with terrestrial systems, including through many mixed fishing-agricultural livelihoods. In this context, our paper details how actors adapt to multifaceted changes by utilizing a bricolage of heterogeneous institutional, material, and ideological elements to attempt to maintain their food security and livelihoods. The results point to the importance of attending to multiple, overlapping terrestrial and aquatic commons when analyzing climate change impacts in freshwater commons

New York City, like many other coastal metropolitan areas, is facing several interrelated impacts of climate change, including sea level rise, more intense and frequent storms, and coastal and inland flooding. Combined with long histories of human-induced transformation and degradation, climate change threatens the capacities of New York’s urban-coastal ecosystems to provide benefits for human and non-human communities. Moreover, climate change intersects with ongoing patterns of (uneven) development and urbanization in ways that challenge public access to waterfronts and coastal spaces, making it difficult for some groups of people to sustain culturally important activities at the water’s edge. In this challenging context, diverse collectives are coming together in NYC to advance environmental stewardship initiatives that generate more equitable human-environment relationships in the city. Some of the key actors are city, state and federal governments, sometimes operating in overlapping jurisdictions, which makes their work valuable for understandings of polycentric governance. Other important actors include community-based organizations, non-profits, university centers, and grassroots activists. Many of them are working together to develop innovative approaches for coping with environmental change and caring for non-human communities as much as human ones. Importantly, they are also working to achieve more just and inclusive environmental stewardship (e.g., enhancing participation, improving access, preserving culturally important connections to the environment). This talk will draw on several local cases to demonstrate how, through this work, both new and longstanding organizations in the city are enacting vital forms of commoning that challenge status quo environmental management and climate adaptation. Reading these local cases through the lens of commoning as well as through the insights of urban political ecology scholarship on the production of nature, the talk will also highlight the role that these various efforts play in disrupting dominant processes of urbanization (and thereby making possible forms of alter-urbanization). In doing so, the talk will examine how these forms of commoning serve as sites for imagining and enacting alternative climate futures in coastal-urban worlds.

In the context of climate change, recognizing and developing social and physical infrastructures that support commoning is critical to enabling coastal community wellbeing. Commoning includes (messy) practices of care that contribute to more-than-human community wellbeing. Investigating commoning activities is thus one way to demonstrate the range of such relationships in a place and to emphasize their pluriversal characteristics. Theories of commoning and more-than-human infrastructures of care are essential for illuminating the character and directionality of caring relations in coastal spaces. Moreover, these lenses can also reveal how traditionally marginalized commoners claim space, access resources, and create community even in ecologically and socially challenging environments. In this paper, we use a case study of shore fishing along the urbanized coastline of Tampa Bay, FL, to document and amplify performances of care and commoning--and the role of particular infrastructures in these performances--as part of the project of moving toward abundant futures. We find that key elements of shore fishing practices embody the pluriversal and help to support wellbeing; namely, claiming time and space for rest, sharing, and connection with more-than-human others. We suggest ways that the social and physical infrastructures essential to these practices might be supported by flexible governance decisions, especially in the high-risk coastal zone. Finally, we discuss how the case is “messy” in that it follows practices and relationships that emerge outside of any organized social movement and contain many socio-ecological tensions. We encourage commons scholars to engage more in messy cases in order to advance theoretical, practical and political goals related to resource access and community wellbeing.

It is an indisputable truism that in a fragile and conflict-affected setting with limited governance, political instability and visionless leadership, communities are ill-equipped to cope with a changing climate and associated environmental hazards. Although there have been numerous discourses on climate change and the consequent environmental hazards, a call for proactive approach to halting the envisaged ruin is indispensable. This paper, therefore, is a clarion call on Africans to delve into their indigenous science systems for proactive approaches toward addressing the climate change crisis. Unfortunately, one major challenge that may likely bedevil this call is the erroneous belief that African traditional ideas and practices are fetish. This paper will argue that climate science, like other branches of knowledge, needs to be broadened and decolonized and that Africa should search within its knowledge systems for appropriate ideas and approaches to many of its development challenges. Also, it will examine how our growing vulnerability could be addressed through the collaboration of western science and environmental education with relevant African science. Additionally, this study will discuss how African researchers and their counterparts in the global north can tap into the vital and time-tested resources of the African indigenous science system. The effects of climate change and environmental hazards on the socio-economic activities of Africans will also be reviewed. However, it expresses optimism that indigenous knowledge and practice can contribute toward managing natural resources, environmental protection, and climate change adaptation in Africa. Possible ways of achieving these will be suggested in the full paper.

The Gulf of Maine is the fastest-warming body of water on earth, impacting Maine’s coastal fisheries and aquaculture industries, which remain primarily small-scale, owner-operated, and community-based. Women and other under-represented genders actively participate in fishing commons and are impacted by climate change. However, their experiences of change, adaptation needs, and experiments with adaptation may be missed in gender-blind needs assessments and climate interventions, which risks deepening existing gender inequities in the sector and overlooking insights into adaptations already underway. Through oral history interviews, we document the embodied, everyday, and unexpected effects of climate change on women’s labor in the sector and their bottom-up experiments with climate adaptation. Oral histories reveal that, in the absence of state or non-profit-led climate adaptation support, women are already adapting their fishing technologies and techniques to climate change, acquiring and applying new knowledge through trial and error, and drawing on their social networks to share information and innovate in response to climate change. We describe these bottom-up adaptations as commoning, part of the everyday knowledge and practices that (re)make the commons for a more resilient and diverse fishing future.

In Tamil Nadu, and elsewhere in the global south, seafood production involves community practices between artisanal fishers, entangled with knowledges of the ocean and marine life. Living-being on the coast in such small-scale fisheries also involves contentious relations with dominant fisher groups, industrial actors and the state. Yet, artisanal fishers have persisted in postcolonial India while living through political-ecological precarity. This paper methodologically thinks-with their contingent material livelihood practices for survival and resistance amidst a Blue Economy that is emerging in India. With its emphasis on coastal shrimp aquaculture to exploit as well as safeguard marine resources from supposedly indiscriminate fishers, it replicates terrestrial practices of enclosure, extraction and monoculture to a watery world that fishers have hitherto not treated as such. First, I ask how the proliferation of such novel yet fraught ecological arrangements contributes to geo-graphical debates on a plantationocene on the coast. Next, I introduce the Palk Bay and Ennore-Pulicat wetlands in Tamil Nadu, which are two regions of Tamil Nadu where this is becoming a reality, with artisanal fishing villages overlapping with proximate shrimp farms and conservation areas. Based on preliminary ethnography, I offer reflections on how fishers contest and make claims to a Blue Economy through diverse economic and environmental rationalities. These operate through three ontological terrains of struggle: i) seafood, as wild or cultivated ecologies, ii) fisheries and shrimp farms, as sites of experimentation where Blue Economy discourses materialize, and iii) coasts, as environments over which fishers’ spatial practices unfold. Finally, I outline my prospective dissertation research in 2025-2026, which assembles such an ontological politics to intimately render capable fishers and marine life. This informs my provocation on an alternative Blue Economy: what are the social, economic and ecological relations that sustain small-scale fisheries and make possible aquaculture that is environmentally just?

Communities who experience disproportionate climate change impacts tend to be excluded from resilience planning. Those efforts typically follow top-down processes within established governance practices that are inaccessible to marginalized folks and reinforce inequalities. Regenerating the commons includes creating opportunities for everyone to meaningfully shape community resilience decisions and experience related benefits. Resilience planning that shifts power into communities and focuses on social vulnerability can affect how people survive and thrive in a climate changed world. The Massachusetts Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness (MVP) 2.0 program is an attempt to change the status quo in resilience planning by bringing new voices into decision-making power, recognizing their labor, addressing root causes of vulnerability, and investing in social infrastructure. It aspires to build capacity for equity-focused community engagement within teams of municipal staff and community liaisons, and ultimately build social capital and community cohesion. My research investigates implementation of this state grant program in several western Massachusetts towns. I am using document review, participant observation, and interviews to understand the MVP 2.0 process as written, how different towns navigate it, and how individuals make sense of their experiences in it. I seek to understand how those experiences explain relationships between engagement approaches, mediating factors, and process outcomes. I am interested in the conditions that allow for community empowerment and how a model like MVP 2.0 can shift conditions that hold systems in place. In a practical sense, our findings will help municipalities reflect on their work during MVP 2.0 and plan for future community engagement. They may be informative for designing future iterations of the MVP program and for other municipalities or offices of community engagement. The findings will also contribute to the participation, resilience, and climate justice literatures, by adding perspectives on equity-centered resilience and community engagement approaches in smaller towns and rural settings.