Monday, June 16, 2025 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM Integrative Learning Center ILCN101
Living with Heat in Social Housing in Sydney Australia: Commons as Social Infrastructure
in-person
Stephen Healy1, Abby Mellick Lopes2, Louise Crabtree-Hayes1, Emma Power1, Cameron Tonkinwise2, Sebastian Pfautsch1, Helen Armstrong3, Bhavya Chitranshi1, and Katherine Gibson1
1Western Sydney University, Australia, 2University of Technology Sydney, Australia, 3Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Sydney, Australia, faces significant impacts from anthropogenic climate change, experiencing extreme heat, drought, wildfires, and flooding. Urban heat risks are unevenly distributed, affecting older adults, those with health issues, and low-income populations more severely. Western Sydney, consistently hotter than coastal suburbs, is home to many vulnerable groups in social housing. This housing, often old and poorly maintained, is unsuited to current and future climate conditions. While governments focus on decarbonization and heat wave preparedness, the lived experiences of those enduring the heat and the role of social practices in climate readiness are often overlooked.
Our three-year study, supported by the Australian Research Council and housing organizations, examined the effects of heat on social housing residents in three communities with distinct demographics and housing types. Engaging residents as community researchers, we uncovered diverse, place-based strategies for coping with heat, including culturally specific adaptations. These insights inform climate actions that emphasize social practices, framing “coolth” (a 19th-century term contrasting warmth) as a shared resource in urban life. Rather than an isolated feature, coolth emerges from the interplay between natural and built environments and the rhythms of social life. Viewing coolth as a "social infrastructure," a concept drawn from Daniel Klingenberg, highlights how it can be cultivated and sustained as an essential quality for enjoyable, liveable outdoor spaces. Through this perspective, coolth becomes a commons—dependent on these interactions and integral to fostering a climate-ready city.
Our co-research approach serves as a basis for social learning and, in doing so, seeks to "common" cooling-capacity. The aim is to enlarge the civic conversation to ensure that social housing residents and community housing providers can shape a more fulsome, robust, and commons-based approach to living with heat.
Patterns of Commoning in Deliberative Democracies?
in-person
Anja Salzer, Maria Menendez-Blanco, Theresa Palmieri, and Kris Krois
Free University of Bolzano, Italy
Climate Citizen Assemblies (CCAs), which have been growing in number in recent years, are a promising approach to shaping the future in response to the challenges of the climate crisis. Climate Citizen Assemblies (CCAs) bring together a diverse group of citizens, randomly selected through a lottery process, to learn, deliberate and make decisions together. As such, they embody the essence of commoning and offer extraordinary emancipatory and transformative possibilities. Reflecting on case studies of CCAs through the lens of commoning can contribute to the development of tools for social change and justice.
Inspired by and working with the commoning patterns identified so far, our research group is exploring emerging patterns of CCAs, some of which may contribute to the pattern language of commoning, and some of which may be more specific to CCAs.
Governing the Commons: an Ethnographic Exploration of Local Response to Complex Global Problems.
in-person
Md Nurul Islam1, Inzamam Us Zaman1, and Samiya A Selim2
1SAJIDA Foundation, Bangladesh, 2 University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, Bangladesh
The complex and dynamic livelihoods in coastal Bangladesh are disrupted by a combination of factors, including climate change-induced sea-level rise (SLR), repeated cyclones, saline intrusion, and development activities. The introduction of commercial aquaculture, policy failures, and local power struggles further compound the challenges. Sea-level rise and saline water intrusion create favorable conditions for shrimp farming, which receive policy support and corporate investment. The study finds that the small holding and subsistence farmers prefer fresh-water aquaculture and agriculture over shrimp farming and influence local governance system for preferred livelihoods.
Using an ethnographic approach, this paper critically analyzes the local government’s response and the adopted strategies to ensure preferred livelihoods in an uncertain and changing climate and socio-political context. Two major strategies employed by the local council include banning commercial shrimp farming inside flood protection embankments and restoring common water and land resources to encourage agroecological practices.
This paper examines the critical role of place-based, localized governance systems for protecting and restoring commons i.e access to land access and water systems that benefit communities over corporate investment. It highlights the importance of community-centric governance approaches and bottom-up policy frameworks in fostering resilience by returning the rights of commons to the communities.
The study emphasizes the need for localized governance of commons and a bottom-up policy approach to enhance social resilience of coastal communities facing the complex dual challenges of climate change and human intervention. By analyzing the role of the local governance system in managing shared resources, the paper aims to provide actionable insights for policymakers, practitioners, and community stakeholders involved in common resource management and policy formulation.
Management of Common Goods in the Face of Climate Change in Chiquitano Indigenous Communities: an Interdisciplinary Approach to Raise Awareness and Empower
in-person
Natalie Guillén Aguirre, Ramiro Molina Barrios, Rodrigo Pacheco, and Juan Pablo Neri
Universidad Católica Boliviana "San Pablo", Bolivia
The research presents a detailed examination of the challenges and opportunities faced by Chiquitano Indigenous communities in Bolivia regarding managing common resources in the context of climate change. The study employed a participatory action research approach, this framework empowered the youth and provided them a platform to voice their concerns and aspirations about the environment.
The findings revealed critical insights into the relationship between the forest and water resources, both for the Chiquitano community and the urban population. The Chiquitano territory, located within one of the region’s most endemic forests, faces pressing issues such as water scarcity and socio-economic inequalities that impede effective resource management. The results emphasized the importance of youth participation in fostering sustainability and protecting the natural environment. The youth expressed a strong desire to engage in decision-making processes related to resource management, demonstrating their potential as agents of change.
The research underscores the need for a sustainable, inclusive approach to resource management that empowers Indigenous voices in the face of climate change, ensuring the preservation of their rights and cultural heritage for future generations. This interdisciplinary study contributes valuable insights to ongoing discussions on climate change, resource management, and Indigenous rights, highlighting the critical role of youth in shaping a sustainable future
Early Climate Mitigation as a Social Dilemma
online
Juana Castro Santa
University of Barcelona, Spain
We introduce a novel game where a decaying atmospheric quality, modeled as a stock variable
determining the payoff externality, can be counteracted through individual mitigation efforts.
It encompasses three characteristics of climate change as a social dilemma: (a) the continuous
nature of climate degradation, (b) the constant influx of emissions resulting from human
economic activities, and (c) the greater efficacy of early mitigation actions. We report findings
from an experiment where, across four treatments, we manipulate the starting atmospheric
quality and introduce inequality in the endowments employed to mitigate. Results indicate
that subjects fail to mitigate in early periods, an individually rational strategy. We do not
find differences between treatments at the aggregate level. However, participants treat their
groupmates’ past mitigation as a strategic substitute for their own mitigation (i.e., if others’
mitigation increase, participants reduce their mitigation). This substitution is less intense if the
initial atmospheric quality is negative.
