Panel 2.3. Relationality and the Climate Commons: Understanding, Feeling, Connecting, and Working with Others

Relationships are a fundamental aspect of our social lives. As relational beings, we have evolved to connect with others, and the quality of these connections significantly influences our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. However, a key question remains: can the quality of these relationships also impact how we collectively manage common pool resources (CPRs)? To address this, we developed an analytical framework to measure relationship quality within groups, focusing on emotional, perceptual, and closeness-related aspects experienced by group members. Through controlled social experiments, we tested whether the quality of relationships within groups affects CPR management. We manipulated relational quality via cooperative, competitive, and individual effort tasks, followed by a CPR game. Our results indicate that the quality of relationships significantly influences resource management. Positive perceptions of self and others’ behaviors, along with a sense of engagement and closeness, led to lower CPR extractions, while negative emotional states and perceptions resulted in higher resource uptake. These findings underscore the actionable role of relationships in CPR management, identifying relational quality as a crucial determinant of collective action and advocating for fostering high-quality connections to improve CPR outcomes.

Addressing pressing social-environmental challenges requires the involvement and connection of interdependent actors with varying perspectives. Inducing perspective-taking can heighten other-regarding considerations and actions in favour of socially desirable outcomes in such situations. By encouraging decision-makers to consider broader perspectives, perspective-taking can foster concern for the well-being or expectations of others and/or for upholding personal and social norms. As a result, perspective-taking can compel prosocial behaviour. In this presentation, we draw on an extensive literature review and behavioural data obtained from fieldwork to explore how perspective-taking alters individuals' assessments of decision situations. Specifically, we examine how perspective-taking induces decision-makers to connect with, appreciate, and feel compelled to address others' needs when feasible and convenient (i.e., helping is within the realm of possibilities and not detrimental to their well-being). Our data comprises the behaviour of 206 farmers in a Peruvian watershed who learned through videos or field trips about the watershed's social and ecological conditions and interactions. A subset of these downstream farmers was asked to consider the perspectives of farmers living and working upstream while undertaking this learning activity.

The relational view moves beyond the ontological notion of the autonomous ego, deciding on self-interested versus cooperative behavior, to that of connected beings --i.e., from cogito ergo sum to curae ergo sum (we care therefore we are). We present the relational theory of collective action and proceed to sum up some of the supporting evidence that has arisen over decades. And just as connectedness can foster collective action, we note how disconnectedness lies at the origins of environmental injustice. We then spend the rest of the talk on implications for managing the commons. Relationality provides us with new strategies for engendering collective behavior. These strategies are not meant to exclude other, more conventional institutional routes to sustainable governance of the commons but, rather, can be employed in concert with other mechanisms. We reflect on the significance of the relational perspective on these critical times and pose the question, "How do we motivate busy urbanites to care for melting glaciers half a world away?"

The cryosphere is rapidly transforming due to climate change, with a shortening ice season, thawing permafrost, and glacial retreat becoming increasingly prevalent. These changes contribute to "Arctic amplification," causing the region to warm four times faster than the rest of the world. Ice has historically been a key indicator of climate change, and the Earth is becoming less 'frozen.' The cryosphere is critical for global climate stability and human populations. Rockstrom et al. (2024) recently identified the Arctic Cryosphere as a planetary commons, spanning national and supranational boundaries. Unlike conventional global commons, the Arctic has been populated for millenia, particularly by Indigenous Peoples. We urgently call for treating Arctic ice, snow, and permafrost as a critical planetary commons – a collectively governed common pool resource important at the planetary scale. Sustaining these frozen commons requires engagement from diverse actors and diverse ways of knowing at local, regional, national, and global levels, extending beyond nation-to-nation decision-making. Building on experience from Interior Alaska and northern Mongolia, this presentation highlights the importance of the concept of frozen commons for current discussions about sustainability and resilience of complex systems. We argue that bringing perspectives, amplifying voices, and elevating ethics of care for human and non-human relations in historically marginalized communities, such as Indigenous Peoples and nomadic herders in decision making and planning efforts is necessary to address climate change in a just and equitable way.

Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) in IPBES terminology or Indigenous knowledge (IK) has been characterized as a knowledge-practice-belief complex. In many cases, the worldview of IK is relational, providing potential cognitive and emotional pathways for collective action to deal with climate change. That is, IK-holders tend to identify with the environment in which they live through relations across individuals, groups, and other-than-human parts of the ecosystem. For example, many Indigenous peoples in the Canadian North talk about three Rs – respect, reciprocity and relations (relationality) in which relations refer to the intimate and holistic knowledge of the land and feelings of kinship with other beings (e.g., Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview, by Umeek).

How can the knowledge and insights of Indigenous peoples be turned into practical action for local benefit? Wildfires have been a major problem in the Canadian mid-North, especially in 2023/24. Focusing on wildfires, we have sought ways to build community resilience through community-level disaster risk reduction (DRR) plans using the intimate local knowledge of the land. In recent years, DRR has replaced the former reactive approach to disasters by promoting interdisciplinary, anticipatory perspectives (e.g., UN Sendai Framework for DRR, 2015-30).

However, many countries (including Canada), still seem to be using a reactive and fragmented approach with many specialized agencies (e.g., for emergency evacuation, cookie-cutter firebreaks). Holistic proactive planning for DRR can benefit from knowledge co-production with local people who know their forests (e.g., forest renewal cycles; dry and wet areas; soil conditions). As government managers do not have this kind of detailed knowledge, standard procedures cannot be used, and individual plans must be co-developed. Our ongoing team project focuses on three sites in northern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, looking for IK on forest burning and developing widely applicable methodologies. Part of the objective is community empowerment and knowledge decolonization.

Reviving the Commons implies planting seeds of transformational change, but only if these seeds are true to the Commons’ origins.
My paper/talk proposes to offer some historical research into the roots of the Commons in the Highlands of Scotland where there is evidence of continuity from before the feudalization of land. It will describe some persistent practices and protocols that gave ongoing meaning to Gaelic words like: tuath, which means both people and land and people and land together; nabacha, which means ‘neighbourliness’ and was the name for Commons’ seasonal decision-making assemblies/meetings; and duthchas/dualchas, which means heritage, birthright in shared land and responsibilities toward the land/place to which one belongs. At the core of this enduring heritage is the relationship between a community and shared land as place, plus shared responsibilities. These relationships and responsibilities were cultural and social as well as political and economic, constituting a way of life.
I will also reflect on my own personal experience from over 10 years’ involvement in the Gabriola Commons, which was founded in 2005 with a regional zoning innovation designating it as a “Community Commons.” I will combine this with reference to evaluations of at least two other Commons to comment on the ongoing relevance of certain core elements of pre-modern, pre-colonial and even pre-feudal commons – as evidenced by what I have discerned of the historical pattern in the Scottish Highlands.
I will end with some thoughts and questions around what I consider to be a necessary de-colonizing critique of the discourse on the Commons and some of the scholarly practices around it. This is essential, I think if the integrity of the historical commons is to be honoured, and for it to fulfill its potential as a genuinely helpful response to the Climate Crisis of our times.

The UN Sendai Framework recognized the need for making our communities safer and more resilient to disasters by shifting policy goals from “managing disasters” to disaster risk reduction (DRR) and building resilience through multi-level partnerships. For DRR and building community resilience to disaster shocks, this study posits that social learning, a process of relational development (primarily institutional) and sharing knowledge through iterative reflections on experience, is key to changing the conventional linear logic-based, reactive framework into one based on learning-by-doing (adaptive management). The latter approach is characterized by iterative rounds of testing and learning from the disaster experience of local and Indigenous peoples to inform subsequent policy and practice. Towards this end, a three-round Policy Delphi process was pursued with the participation of 18 international DRR and SES (social-ecological systems) resilience scholars, practitioners, and public officials.
Weak policy frameworks; operational, cultural and educational/training silos; and domination of technical knowledge were identified by the participants as major challenges in the development of institutional relationships and the transmission of learning. Delphi participants emphasized forward-looking, resilient solutions that leave the system better prepared to deal with future change, a fundamental departure from dealing with disasters reactively. Further, adopting a complex systems approach and using a SES perspective help view disasters in a more holistic social and environmental context, with due regard to the human dimension. Incorporating more social science to balance technical knowledge enhances transdisciplinary understandings. Social learning can be best developed among all participants through engagement in the learning process itself. Doing so requires building social capital (including trust relationships) between communities and government agencies, strengthening networks and partnerships, and working towards knowledge systems that are egalitarian and open to diverse values.

Market prices often do not reflect the social and environmental externalities resulting from the production of consumption goods, nor may consumers always be aware of them. Certified labels, such as Fairtrade, aim to address these sustainability concerns, but could be hampered by (a) the distance between consumption and production, and (b) a lack of knowledge regarding the local impacts of one’s purchase decisions. This paper addresses these barriers by analysing whether using a 360° Virtual Reality (VR) video, providing information on production impacts in a distant part of the world, increases sustainable consumption behaviour compared to a text-with-picture treatment and a no-information control. We do so in the context of the cocoa-chocolate value chain. We find that consumers are willing to pay a premium for prosocial and environmentally friendly features in chocolate at existing levels of information provision (i.e., no-information control). These preferences for sustainability features are positively related to consumers’ post-treatment feature knowledge and feelings of connection to beneficiaries, and moderated by their interaction. However, VR does not increase the premiums for sustainability features. Rather, VR enhances the willingness to pay for all chocolate types, i.e., with or without sustainability features. In exploring this further, we find that participants who experience immersive VR for the first time offer to pay more for chocolate broadly, as well as for sustainability features. In addition, though VR did not induce increases in the degree of consumers’ connection to sustainability beneficiaries, it led to a positive framing of individuals from the cocoa producing country by the participants. By providing a novel experience and/or conveying general insights into cocoa farmers' lives and production efforts, VR thus has the potential to increase funds for living incomes and sustainable production initiatives.