Cardenas, Helena

This panel of presentations will focus on how contemporary conservation actions draw on findings from the Commons to improve environmental, social, and economic outcomes. Despite decades of research on common-pool resources and their collective management, the integration of insights from the Commons literature into conservation action remains challenging. This is due, in part, to the difficulty and complexity of planning, implementing, and monitoring conservation. However, within the Commons there has been an historical emphasis on studying pre-existing collective arrangements in contrast to transitions to collective action or commoning. Thus, contemporary scholarship on the Commons that focuses on sustainable transitions and commoning movements hold particular relevance for conservation action.

This panel will reflect on the relevance and incorporation of insights from the Commons for establishing collective ownership, management, monitoring, and evaluation of natural resources. Barriers to incorporating insights from the Commons include the stickiness of traditional conservation models that are anathema to collective management; institutional inefficiencies and complexity that inhibit collective management; conflicts and barriers within groups that prohibit effective community management; and the difficulty of scaling collective governance while attending to temporal, spatial, and cultural context. Despite these challenges, there is growing empirical evidence that deliberative democracy, community-based conservation, indigenous management, and equitable conservation are gaining traction within conservation organizations and conservation movements more broadly. The presentations in this panel will synthesize these trends and how they relate to the Commons in retrospect and prospect.