Robson, James

This opening paper provides an overview that sets context ahead of the other panel presentations, building on key insights from multi-year and multi-sited empirical work investigating youth mobility, its impact on rural commons, and the responses to those impacts. It explores: whether the structures and institutions of communal life, work and governance are factors in young peoples’ decision to stay (in their home communities), migrate away, or return; the kinds of commons regimes that young people want to be a part of; and, strategies that communities (and youth members) are experimenting with to navigate the pressures, changes, and opportunities that migration can bring. This allows reflection as to the implications of this social phenomenon for commons scholarship. Insights are drawn from youth visioning workshops that have taken place across different global regions over a 7-year period, and ethnographic work conducted in multiple Latin American countries. Communities are looking to adapt to demographic and cultural change, as out-migration drives shortfalls in collective labor and territorial presence. In many ways, youth are leading, or wanting to lead, this response, asking community leaderships to empower them as actors in community spaces and, in doing so, challenge some of the cultural norms that have long characterized these regimes.

Rural migration erodes traditional knowledge and social cohesion, weakening commons regimes. We worked with young Indigenous people from El Condor, an Andean community in Northwest Argentina to examine what drives youth to leave, what encourages them to stay, and how management of a common-pool resource shapes young people’s community engagement. Workshops were held with youth, both in the home community and in La Quiaca, a nearby urban center. Youth migrate because of limited job and educational opportunities, while the desire to stay is motivated by cultural ties, family connections, and to preserve traditions and relationship to the land. Out-migration to a nearby urban centre helps maintain those ties. We also find that the communal management of vicuña, a wild South American camelid of important cultural, economic, and conservation value, offers youth a way to contribute socially and economically to their community. Their continued involvement in this management shows how the commons can provide youth with a connection to community, to their elders, and their identity. For those working to support sustainable CPR use, finding ways to strengthen collective identity and cohesion in a context of increased mobility will be an essential part of securing resilient, rural commons