Mudaliar, Praneeta

Nobel laureate and commons scholar Elinor Ostrom found that trust, reciprocity, and institutions are key for managing and conserving environmental commons such as natural resources. Yet, more research is needed for understanding what factors might motivate and sustain collective action for creating commons produced through commoning such as climate justice? Commoning is a phenomenon where actors create new shared and relational processes, redesign institutions such as norms and rules around a shared interest to serve a common good, as well as develop new imaginaries of sharing and caring. Thus, care unfolds not only as a motivation for climate justice but also embeds itself in commoning to sustain a sense of community and support.
In our research on youth groups in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), we uncover the practices of care that emerge at the intersection of commoning and climate justice through an intersectional lens of race, gender, immigration status, and sexuality, by applying Fisher and Tronto's ethic of care that includes actions of the powerful such as caring about and caring for, and actions of the less powerful such as caregiving and care-receiving. In doing so, we draw attention to uneven power dynamics in youth groups.
Our findings highlight the multi-dimensionality and complexity of care through intersecting identities and experiences of young people who are actively developing new ways of fostering resilience and creating inclusive spaces for sustaining commoning for climate justice. At the same time, uneven power dynamics in caregiving between White people and racialized people in youth groups suggest that even the practice of youth-led commoning can reproduce and maintain patterns of marginality. Our findings provide new insights about the connections between commoning and care for building and maintaining relationships and trust for motivating and sustaining long-term collective action.

New York’s Hudson River watershed governance system is situated in one of the nation’s largest toxic superfund sites that has resulted in environmental injustices for communities living alongside the river. State agencies, regional civil society organizations, research institutions, local governments, and not-for-profit organizations play an important role in multi-faceted processes of watershed governance in the Hudson River Watershed (HRV). In this paper, we present preliminary results of our ongoing engagements with key decision-makers in watershed governance in the HRV. Much of the existing literature on power in collaborative watershed governance critiques their tendency to create uneven power distribution and potential for environmental injustices or elite dominance. However, a genuinely collaborative governance approach would ideally include mechanisms that allow marginalized groups to escape these constraints, enabling them to govern themselves more effectively. We seek to broaden understanding of how structures of governance shape power dynamics and the ongoing efforts to incorporate diverse actors, knowledge, and perspectives in the HRV. In the process, we seek to advance debates on power, inequality, and justice in watershed governance.

Multiple-use common-pool resources (CPRs) are used for activities such as irrigation, fishing, and recreation (Steins and Edwards, 1998; Meinzen-Dick and van Der Koek, 2001; Ramachandran, 2006). While collective rules and institutions are key for managing CPRs (Ostrom, 1990; Schlager and Blomquist, 1998; Agrawal, 2003), more research is needed on specific strategies employed by resource user groups with power asymmetries to access, use, and manage resources from multi-use commons. Limited research finds that less powerful users respond to domination through strategies such as silence, non-participation, or solidarity (Agrawal, 2002; Cleaver, 2002; Kashwan, 2016; Mudliar and Koontz, 2021). These strategies, termed “everyday politics” (Kerkvliet, 1999), are shaped by power dynamics, social relations, the perceived meaning and value of the resource, observations of behaviors, and life experiences (Edwards and Steins, 1998). This research, therefore, explores how groups with power imbalances (i.e., farmers and Dhinwars, an Indigenous fishing community) manage and access multi-use commons such as the Maji-Malguzari (MM) tanks in eastern Vidarbha, Maharashtra, India, for their livelihoods. MM tanks, dating to the 16th century, are used by both groups, with farmers seeking to appropriate water for paddy irrigation and Dhinwars seeking to maintain water levels for their fish stock. By employing Kerkvliet’s concept of everyday politics, focus-group discussions, and interviews reveal that while Dhinwars may endure unfair conditions, they also employ various resistance strategies against farmer domination. By examining everyday politics between different resource user groups, this study aims to deepen understanding of the interplay between domination and resistance in natural resource management.

Games are increasingly being used as intervention tools to facilitate sustainable commons management among community members. Games provide key benefits by enabling participants to experience, reflect, and experiment (Kolb and Kolb 2009). In these low-risk environments, games allow players to engage with the complexities of social-ecological systems, explore risky behaviors, and create and negotiate rules (Falk et al., 2023; Janssen et al., 2023). The resulting social learning can extend beyond the framing of the game, developing institutional capacity for sustainable commons management (Meinzen-Dick et al. 2018). While these benefits are well-documented in games used in field experiments, similar advantages may arise when games are played in classroom settings. To explore this, we played the fishing game with undergraduate students in two institutions in the United States and one institution from Canada. The fishing game simulates common-pool resource (CPR) concepts such as communication, trust, and rules through a sustainability dilemma. Student reflections from the game reveal three main findings. One, students highlight that communication, without transparency and trust, is inadequate for fostering cooperation among different groups. Second, students expressed difficulty in grappling with the dilemma of needs of the broader community versus one’s own community. Finally, with challenges in crafting institutions for cooperation, students call for increased government intervention, including more regulation and stricter punitive measures on rule violators, even while expressing distrust in the government. Overall, students gain cognitive learning from the game—understanding key concepts like communication, trust, and institutions—while grappling with real-world dilemmas of sustainable resource management. At the same time, it is unclear whether games may promote normative learning, where deeper shifts in norms and values occur. This suggests that while games may be effective at teaching CPR concepts, more research is needed to understand whether games can foster the value changes for long-term sustainable behavior.