Session 2. 2. B.

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.