Panel 1.11. Adaptive ocean governance: novel approaches for navigating complex institutional and property rights arrangements
co-Chairs: Ben Nagel1, Stefan Partelow2, and Achim Schlüter1
1Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), Germany, 2University of Bonn, Germany
Ocean governance needs to be adaptive to social-ecological changes. However, the complexity of existing institutional and property rights arrangements makes this challenging. Different types of rules, norms and property types (i.e., private, common, state) governed by a multitude of intertwined formal and informal regimes are often interacting in ways that can be either complementary or lead to conflict. These complex ocean governance seascapes are therefore difficult to understand through a single theoretical lens or framework. This panel brings together research which explores adaptive ocean governance processes from different methodological perspectives. We particularly invite contributions from scholars who investigate how these intertwined ocean governance arrangements, or actors embedded in them, adapt and respond in the face of change and uncertainty. In doing so, this panel aims to foster dialogue regarding, on the one hand, different processes of governance change happening in the marine realm around the world, and on the other hand, on different methodological approaches to investigate those processes of adaptive governance.
Panel 1.17. Communities, Collaboration and Stewardship
This panel will act as both a book launch event for the edited volume Ethics and the Commons to be published by Springer Nature in late 2024 or early 2025. The volume is edited by myself (Partelow). The session will offer speed talks from authors who have contributed chapters to the book. The panel will also accept new submissions related to the topic of ethics and the commons. The short speed talks (approximately 5 minutes) will be followed by an open roundtable discussion with the panelists and the audience on the core ethical issues facing research on the commons, the ethics of the commons, and broader ethical debates in science.
Wednesday, June 18, 2025 10:00:00 – 12:00:00 Hasbrouck Hall HAS 137
A Systematic Review of the Commoning Literature: Definitions, Applications and Transformative Potential
in-person
Stefan Partelow and Lennart Schulze
Center for Life Ethics, University of Bonn, Germany
This paper systematically reviews the literature on commoning across all fields and sectors. The systematic analysis examines over 560 peer-reviewed journal articles that explicitly use the term ‘commoning’ in the title, abstract or keywords. Each title and abstract was screened to ensure that each article fit the scope of the project, which enabled a full text analysis of each. In doing so, we examine the spectrum of definitions, narratives, contexts and concepts associated with research on commoning. Furthermore, we examine the logical arguments and empirical support for the transformative potential of commoning as a form of social organization, collective action and mechanism for structural reorganization of social and economic life towards sustainability. In the discussion we reflect on the term’s diversity of meanings and uses, as well as directions forward within a diversifying body of literature.
Wednesday, June 18, 2025 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM South College SCOE480
Ethical Commoning: a Framework for Orienting Values, Practices, and Capacities
in-person
Stefan Partelow1, Christopher Luederitz2, and Guido Caniglia3
1Center for Life Ethics, University of Bonn, Germany, 2McGill University, Canada, 3University of Helsinki, Finland
The term commoning has acquired a variety of meanings. However, despite the intuitions that many scholars have that commoning has a normative orientation aligned with community building, justice and sustainability, there are no clear conceptual frameworks detailing the values and ethics of commoning practices. Empirically examining commoning practices needs clear frameworks to be able to descriptively and normatively identify and document commoning practices, while also being able to differentiate commoning from other less or non-desirable collective action and community building activities (e.g., organized crime; anti-democratic or discriminatory political movements; collusion). Current research has focused on community-level collective action processes that embody, enable, create or sustain resources held in common, that is the commons. Others emphasize the practices and performances of becoming in common as commoners, entire communities, and their environment. Despite these differences, similar values often underpin commoning - which may include the aim to transform outcomes (e.g., solidarity, fairness, care for the environment) - have yet to be synthesized into a working framework. In this Chapter, we ask: what does an ethics of commoning look like that allows for the realization (and further shaping) of those values? And how can we account for what it means to do commoning (ethically) well? But also, how can we provide orientation to commoning? To address these questions, we introduce a framework that allows for articulating the three interwoven components of an ethics of commoning: (a) values of commoning, directed towards social justice and environmental sustainability; (b) alternative value practices, that engage with the materiality of the world outside of dominant ones; and (c) individual and collective capacities for commoning, based on practical wisdom and virtue ethics. We use the framework to articulate and analyze the ethical dimensions of commoning. Through the idea of commoning wisdom, we use the framework to provide orientation and inspiration about how to think about the ethical work embedded in the practice of commoning.
