Session 9. 12.

Communities largely depend on commons every day; however, they are mostly managed and controlled by the state. This paper is derived from the everyday experience of loss of commons to industries; it highlights the experience of loss is exacerbated by a lack of recognition of community rights over the common's resources. The role of local governance bodies and user communities is negated while allocating local resources for industrial development. The understanding that commons such as wasteland, forests, unsurveyed land, and coastal belts are state-owned contributes to the arbitrary allotment of common resources for development projects.
Methodology
Fieldwork is conducted in select coastal villages of Kachchh (Kutch), Gujarat affected by multiple industrial projects sanctioned contiguously. Coastal commons, such as settled sand dunes, mangroves, marshland, wasteland and grazing land, are essential to traditional livelihood and social and cultural aspects. The paper is based on ethnographic data on experiencing the loss of commons every day. Participant observation and in-depth interviews were employed to understand the complex network of local commons people's everyday dependence on it and experiencing the transition. Field narratives on lack of knowledge about the land allotment for industries left people unaware of the upcoming transition in the region's local ecology and social and economic landscape. Ethnographic data on the opaque nature of land transfer shed light on the absence of community rights.
Key Findings:
Alienating local communities from commons management and governance in the coastal Villages of Kachchh has accelerated the industrial activities undermining the well-being of ecology and community. It left little to no space for communities to resist or raise their concern about the entire process. PIL emerged as the last resort to challenge the common land allotment to industries without consulting the Gramsabha; however, engaging with juridical spaces revealed the darker reality of the absence of vocabulary to assert community rights over commons (In this context marshland, wasteland, intertidal zone, mangroves forests, thorny and shrub forests, grazing land located around revenue villages). Commons governance, largely reliant on government resolutions, largely discusses the provision of allotment of common land for various development purposes rather than community ownership and rights.

Indonesian state environmental management remains largely top-down, despite the fall of the authoritarian regime in 1998, and associated social movements and decentralization initiatives. Such an environmental management encloses the commons, favor private companies, and displace local tenure systems and livelihoods, some of the more evident and persistent colonial legacies. This study aimed to discuss (1) factors that preserve the colonial legacy in Indonesian environmental management and (2) a local tourism commoning initiative in an Indonesian village that challenge the legacy. Focusing on the practice of commoning for tourism, this study applies a political ecology approach with participant observation and in-depth interviews. The study found that Indonesian environmental management is maintained by a combination of positivist paradigm, capitalist (neoliberal) forestry regime and patronage relationships. Started with a movement to reject a mining operation, the villagers develop a commoning by managing boat tour that ensure equal distribution among members. They take over the management of their village landscape, by constantly battling with patronage and capitalist systems deployed by the local state agencies, provide counter discourse such as “sharing wellbeing”, and make use of cracks and loopholes in the state formal programs.

With a “primordial anchorage in artistic creation and making” (Henry, 2022), independent artistic and cultural venues, organized as cultural commons and anchored in the solidarity economy, articulate artistic, social and territorial issues. They are organized around a logic of action based on experimentation and organizational creativity, driven by collectives of users, professional or amateur artists, and developing practices outside the art world, with a diversity of partners. Together, these practices embody a collective control of use that makes these places emerge as “polycentric public spaces”, “a space of interactions generated by citizens speaking and acting together” (Laville, 2003). Organization as commons is experienced through the organization of space as a primary resource for embodying a diversity of citizen-based cultural practices (as opposed to institutional / industrial organization).
Faced with the increasing real estate speculation threatening their very existence, the commoners are organizing the collective ownership of those places, as a strategic tool for the long-term survival of cultural commons. Lacking a legal recognition as commons, they attempt to ensure that the citizen-based ability to control the use of those cultural places prevails over the centralized power logics that characterize public and private ownership modes, especially by organizing collective ownership via “solidarity collective landholdings”, inspired by models such as the community land trusts movement. Collective ownership is not itself devoid of ambiguity, and recomposes – rather than eliminates – these issues of power. Reducing control over use to a shared property – even if it is sufficiently diffuse that no personal power is fully established – does not protect against the new emergence of the powers of the “small owner”, and raises questions about the relationship of the commons to the long-term nature of real estate investment. This article analyzes, on the basis of case studies from France, the major challenge represented by the organization of a tool such as the solidarity community land-trust (“foncière solidaire”) to protect the cultural commons: what kind of organizational processes, rules and tools can equip communities to dissolve owner power in the collective ownership in order to defend a collective control of use? The aim is to shed light on the tension between proprietary tools and democratic issues at the heart of the cultural commons.