The use of chemical pesticides and mineral fertilizers in agriculture continues to present a serious governance problem. Pesticides and fertilizers as private goods help farmers increase yield and protect plants from pests. However, their overuse harm shared benefits from public goods such as soil, biodiversity, and human health. The ‘invisible’ chemical commons emerging from the interaction of pesticide and fertilizer use with economic development, land use decisions, and climate change have underappreciated consequences for both humans and nature. Appropriate policy framework to guide farmer behavior with due consideration to the complex set of tradeoffs between food, climate, biodiversity, and human health while also ensuring equity is largely missing because of several unknowns. For example, monitoring the use of chemicals and their environmental fate is extremely challenging; a detailed picture of their mobility across time and place is largely missing; current institutional designs that encompass both economic and regulatory measures for public decision-makers, and collective actions for individual farmers are yet to deliver successful examples. To address this problem, we present emerging research from India and Uganda and invite panelists working on chemical commons from different fields, geographies, and scales. We aim to initiate a dialogue around the following question: What theories, concepts, and methods from commons research can help to understand chemical commons?
