Session 10. 1.

Tangible (environmental) or intangible (knowledge) shared resources can be managed as commons. Recently, scholars theorised that in all socio-ecological systems, community members share knowledge regarding the tangible resource to ensure its sustainable management. However, it appears that sometimes tangible and intangible components can be simultaneously present within the same shared resource, which we identify as ‘hybrid’. This complexity is particularly evident where heterogeneous and entangled resources, traditionally rooted in a specific place, are valued by actors as the expression of their collective identity and as a commodifiable ‘productive heritage’.
This communication analyses a case study involving the management of tangible, intangible and hybrid resources embedded in the Aubrac region. Located in the centre of France, it is well known for its mountain landscapes and cultural heritage. Over time, it has favoured the development of productive activities valorising the local cattle breed, the ‘Aubrac cow’ (namely livestock farming). For almost 60 years, local stakeholders have engaged in collective action strategies to valorise and protect the local productive tangible and intangible heritage, as well as the place-based reputation attached to the name ‘Aubrac’[1]. In parallel, the need of countervailing uncertainty due to economic and ecological perturbations pushed stakeholders to pool new information and existing knowledge to develop innovative institutional and organisational configurations. In this context, we identify five interconnected tangible, intangible and hybrid resources, including the local breed, the place-based reputation and community's long-term capacity to innovate, create and exchange value.
Drawing on original fieldwork data and previous studies [2], we characterise these resources and show the links between them. We then identify the collective action problems affecting these resources and the community-based institutional responses to ensure their sustainability. With this study, we set the frame for a new methodological approach to analyse the long-term governance of localised productive resources.

[1] Guerrieri F., Governing governance: Collective action and rulemaking in EU agricultural and non-agricultural geographical indications (2023), PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam.
[2] Bousquet J. and Dervillé M., Pérennité et renouvellement des exploitations agricoles de l'Aubrac: enjeux individuels et collectifs (2022), 16eme Journée de Recherches en Sciences Sociales.

Local social organization to support sociobiodiversity value chains (e.g., agroforestry, forest, meliponiculture, and fisheries management) in the Brazilian Amazon has been historically based on community associations and farmers’ cooperatives. These organizations have been important building blocks in the partnerships with private business, funding agencies, non-profit organizations, and governmental sector. However, they have been limited to address multiple challenges faced by local producers, and the young generation increasingly hesitate to join these organizations. In the last decades, a range of new social arrangements or social innovations have emerged in the region to overcome these limitations as a result of a commoning process. Based on a database of 200 place-based initiatives and six cases of sociobioeconomy production systems, we present an analysis of how new forms of social organization, which have been developed by local communities and organizations throughout the Amazon. These include formal and informal collectives and networks (e.g., ‘Rede de Sementes do Xingu’, ‘Coletivo do Pirarucu’) addressing contextual challenges, such as asymmetric and unfavorable commercial relations, lack of logistical infrastructure, political invisibility, pressures from illegal economies, among others. Although community association and cooperatives remain important building blocks of local organizations, new organizational models in partnership with local, regional, national, and international actors and organizations have allowed them to address supra-community constraints and opportunities, such as better access to markets, developing processing industries for value aggregation, and pursuing policy changes (e.g., minimum price policies) at the state level. In the process, local organizations are finding new pathways to reconcile social, environmental, and political demands without depending on historical legacies of clientelism that are often reproduced in many community associations and cooperatives. We examine the emerging polycentric organizational arrangement as creative and strategic responses from local organizations to address shared and place-specific problems. These emerging arrangements reflect the contemporary complexity of the Amazon and the historical pursuits of small-scale and indigenous producers for being heard, seen, and valued as major actors shaping the regional economy and biodiversity conservation.

Governmental and non-governmental actors have been promoting community forestry enterprises (CFEs) as a sustainable development strategy, encouraging their compliance with official laws, policies, and programs. However, formal forest regulations often are conservation-oriented and overly technocratic and structured – in contrast with communities’ (lesser-known) informal ways to manage their communal forest resources, which tend to be more holistic and context-appropriate. In that context, Indigenous peoples may apply formal rules in their own way, mixing them with, or adapting them to, their own informal, traditional norms, resulting in institutional innovations that better fit both conservation and wellbeing goals and align with local conditions. By looking at different types of CFEs in 13 communities across a river basin in the Peruvian Amazon, this study develops a critical understanding of Indigenous adaptations of formal rules that govern forest commons to fit both conservation and wellbeing goals, as well as to better respond to the local context, aligning them with local, informal institutions. Our findings uncover a wide variety of innovative institutional systems that are more holistic, appropriate, and just than the original formal ones. We reveal the creation of more flexible, less structured versions of formal rules for forest use, monitoring, and commercialization on the ground, to secure their livelihoods, needs, and wellbeing, and make rule application and enforcement easier and less costly. Communities also create more comprehensive and culturally-appropriate versions of formal rules that regulate land tenure and producer associations, by complementing them with specific, traditional informal systems. Our findings contribute to closing the knowledge gap concerning the role of informal institutions in policymaking and management of forest commons, and to better inform existing efforts to promote CFEs to make them more effective and just. Findings are relevant for Peru and the Amazon as a whole.

This article aims 1) to analyze the interactions between the State, land property and urban commoning from a global perspective; 2) to examine how such interactions accrue on the commoners - how social interactions between urban commoners are regulated by formal and informal rules, how they solve conflicts, and how they manage to cooperate towards the potentially rival use of space, time and means of production -, and 3) to examine the potential advantages and pitfalls of the interactions between urban commoners and local politics, including the institutional learning possibilities in both the South and the North. We argue that the development of Nation States in Western Europe and the imposition of such states onto Latin American colonies have determined historically different relations with local societies and particularly with commoning groups in each continent. The fully embraced ideas of progress and development in European societies played a hegemonic and continuous role in legitimizing Nation States and private property, abolishing the commons that are now rescued by local governments. On the other hand, the non-hegemonic domination of Latin American indigenous cultures and the confluence between original inhabitants and African newcomers has historically generated resistance to foreign Nation States, with clear consequences to the relations between the enduring commons and the State. As such, many European urban commons are innovating in “direct administration” of public heritage and collaboration/challenge between activists and local governments, of which the cases of Barcelona en Comù and emerging commons in Naples are two different and paradigmatic examples, whereas in Latin America and particularly in Brazil, the transmission of knowledge and self-management canons has been the main guiding principle, since the colonial inherited states and their relationship with the commons have not changed much, as the Dandara and Nova Esperança examples will show. We will take on Stavrides’ (2022) sources of common spaces and on Miraftab's (2009) "invited" and "invented" spaces to explore struggles and/or cooperation within, through, outside, and despite the state and compare the current European and Brazilian cases in “their own terms”. Taking from the experiences and diverse interpretations of policy-making in Europe we will finally discuss how innovative relationships between the expertise of commoners and that of the bureaucracy may be challenging and/or collaborative, and if and how they point to enhancing the commons.