Session 10. 13.

The Survey of Villages and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas (SVAMITVA) scheme was introduced in 2020 by the Government of India and is implemented by the Ministry of Panchayati Raj. The scheme aims to provide ownership records (Property Cards) to rural landholders for their homestead land. Issuing these property cards ensures security and clarity for landowners, reduces land disputes in rural areas through accurate records, and increases land value, enabling owners to access bank loans.
The SVAMITVA implementation process includes boundary marking of various types of land (homestead, commons, private, etc.), drone mapping and surveying of properties, data re-verification with the public and local institutions, and issuing property cards to owners. Through SVAMITVA, rural properties are demarcated, land rights are issued, and records are digitized. The scheme also maps commons and public lands, such as roads, schools, public institutions, community spaces, and government land, marking their boundaries. Thus, SVAMITVA helps protect common lands from misuse or fraudulent transactions, especially by powerful people belonging to higher castes and class.
The aim of this study is to verify the effectiveness of mapping common lands in rural India under the SVAMITVA scheme. Using PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal) tools, the study seeks to determine whether the boundaries of commons align with the village mapping and cadastral maps created under the scheme. This will also help in understanding status of known commons as well as status of land being used as commons which is not formally identified as such - like land used as waste land, etc. The study will also enable us to understand geographic overlap issues in public and private lands and redressal mechanisms deployed by the community and local institutions. This will provide greater insights regarding participatory mechanisms through which commons were mapped and protected (or not) under the scheme.

We notice several people from different groups, networks and movements devoting much time, effort and care to planet-wide issues related to ecosystems, climate, extractive technology and economics, etc., often referred to as a “metacrisis”. However, the practices of stewarding and curating the knowledge around these vital areas seem not to embody the principles of commoning that we aspire to. Our global challenges are highly complex, but current political views too often take singular perspectives, and each perspective sets the context for its own patterns of what is regarded as valid and valuable knowledge in that context. As the patterns and availability of knowledge shape conscious activity, effective action in the world falls woefully short.

According to the principles of requisite variety, to address these complex issues needs approaches that are at least equally rich and complex, which in turn will need to be supported by knowledge systems arising from multiple perspectives. Both of the present authors have in recent years been exploring how we might build knowledge commons that have the requisite richness, while recognising the disconnect between the complex reality "out there" and the way in which we have been structuring and managing knowledge about those realities. We separately take inspiration from natural non-human living systems, and from the power of collective human dialogue. Relationality is vital.

In this paper we outline our two approaches to this challenge, as there is not simply one clear solution. We thus invite constructive critique, to pick out the most promising valuable aspects of each approach, combining and improving on them. An urgent technical challenge is to build better wikis or wiki-like tools which embody as well as support the patterns relevant to regenerative practice, as well as life-wide learning. On the social and cultural side, we also need to develop the patterns and practices of commoning.

Commoning is constructed by the relationality of people- who remember. How can the act of collectively remembering further support relationality and commoning? What novel understandings on the potential and scalability of commoning do these plural memories propose? This paper includes evidence from research-action methodologies based on memory as implemented in Boston (USA), Medellin (Colombia), Chios (Greece) and Lisbon (Portugal). The four cases are based on processes of interrelation driven by the act of remembering and sharing emotional and embodied memories. They include community initiatives, academics, artists and inhabitants. The process followed in each geo-sociohistorical context highly depends on the local heritage and the processes and tools followed by the same communities. The act of inviting individuals to remember and narrate as part of research and action methodologies led to the identification of the deeper reasons that drive connections as well as the creation of commoning processes among academia and communities. We collectively identified a correlation among the aspects that exist and persist in memory and the sustainability and/ or transition of processes. Commoning, when read through the lived experiences and emotions of the individuals that form part of it has the potential to reveal an understanding of the will to common as the aspect that enables the transition of commoning processes within and across places and times. Additionally, the sequence followed in the methodological pathway- remembering, narrating, creating collective knowledge and claims and acting together- supports and sustains collective processes among academia, artists and communities in all of the cases presented. Memory in this article is, thus, presented as a core component that motivates individuals and groups to common and at the same time as a source of information on how and why to do it.

This year approaches the 20th anniversary of the publication of Ostrom’s Social Ecological Systems framework, Initially published in 2007 in PNAS as a “diagnostic approach for going beyond panaceas.” In its various forms, this framework has been cited more than 10,000 times. Yet the framework has failed to foster the kinds of diagnosis Ostrom and her colleagues dreamed of in 2007. In this paper I argue that this is because the framework Ostrom proposed, and the research programs it engendered failed to engage with the middle-range causal theory which is the heart of effective diagnosis. Diagnosis can be defined as the process of identifying the cause a phenomena, and thus places causality at its center. In the context of social-ecological systems, which are inherently complex, identifying causality requires focusing on narrow ranges of contextual conditions in particular circumstances, much as diagnosis in medicine requires detailed understanding of particular organ systems and pathogens. The generality of Ostrom’s framework distracts users from this focus on causal interactions in context, while aiming for a level of generality that simply does not exist in the diverse nature of social ecological interactions. In its place, I suggest that commons researchers return to a focus on identifying the causes of particular desirable and undesirable social and ecological outcomes, drawing on tools for analyzing actors, institutions, incentives, and power relations, many of which were pioneered by Ostrom, and build generalizations from the bottom up, by identifying social ecological conditions with shared sets of causal relationships.