Philipp Gutierrez, Dannia Eyelli

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.