Session 2. 2. A.

This paper examines the opportunities and challenges that place-based informal governance networks encounter in supporting coastal communities facing climate-related hazards and their impacts. Coastal communities in the eastern US are enduring increasing impacts from hazards related to climate change, such as tropical cyclones, unprecedented winter storms, and sea level rise. While federal and state-agencies provide funding to address some of these impacts, community members are often left without government support if their losses or the hazards themselves fall outside of government defined thresholds and descriptors. This paper examines the informal networks that have emerged following climate-related storm events in three coastal communities: Biloxi, MS; Bath, ME; and Rockland, ME. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews with community leaders (e.g., representatives of non-governmental organizations, faith-based organizations, municipal-level civil servants, etc.), participant observation at community meetings, and document collection of local media coverage, it reveals how informal processes of resource and service provision emerged. Findings demonstrate challenges that these networks encounter in meeting the diverse needs of community members, particularly those that have been historically marginalized (e.g., immigrant community members). Yet, these emergent networks also present unique opportunities for enhancing support, such as their flexibility, long-standing community relationships, and capacity to access information and respond to needs swiftly. This research highlights the critical roles that informal, often under-resourced, networks play in addressing coastal community impacts from climate hazards.

Given calls to decolonise engagement with Indigenous communities, this article explores how allied researchers can participate in self-determined learning with Indigenous Peoples. Drawing on over a decade of experience within an action-research collective in a Mapuche context, the authors suggest that allied researchers can accompany Indigenous-led co-design in a manner that not only strengthens genuine Indigenous participation but also fosters mutual and collective learning from within the co-creative processes themselves. Lake Budi, a biocultural hotspot in the Pacific coast of Northern Patagonia, Chile, is a coastal wetland habitat for hundreds of endemic and migratory species and the ancestral homeland for the Mapuche-Lafkenche (∼15,000) who, through grassroots learning, are determining practical steps towards restoring their territory, its commons and their self-governance for kvmemongen. This Mapuche concept refers broadly to enacting forms of living well together, humans and non-humans. As allied participants in a Mapuche-led codesign collective since 2013, in this paper, we focus on exploring key “moments of mutual learning” within this longer-than-usual co-design process towards land-based community-based economic and environmental governance tools. Each of these moments involved collective learning that required interaction and feedback loops across diverse areas of expertise, made possible over longer and flexible rhythms and periods. Tools, protocols, and methods gradually take shape in such a process through mutual learning opportunities provided by relationship building, cultural immersion, community-led protocols, decision-making, and evaluation mechanisms. This work suggests a new understanding of the involvement of allied researchers in Indigenous-led co-design as an emerging and increasingly relevant form of grassroots mutual learning toward indigenous climate resilience through self-governed regenerative economies.

Biocultural restoration as a response to climate change from within Indigenous Peoples' territories, requires an intercultural-critical understanding of the past and present dynamics of degradation and fragmentation affecting them, as well as those of self-governance and recovery of social-ecological systems, in their heterogeneous and complex interactions with one another. Based on demand from the Ayllarewe Budi, a Mapuche-Lafkenche ancestral territory and biocultural refuge extending over hundres of miles of coastal marshlands south of the Nahuelbuta mountain range in Southern Chile, this collaborative research project is being codesigned and conducted adaptively, at the intersection of micro-historical reconstruction, the analysis of environmental governance, and decolonizing environmental knowledge through ontological dialogues with territorial knowledge agents. The temporal-spatial focus of this project, the Ayllarewe Budi, as well as the broader Mapuche territory, Wallmapu, were self-sufficient and self-governed until the late 19th century. A century and a half of radical transformations in the land, brought about by the imposition of internal colonialism and then modernization, were responded to, not only by resistance against being incorporated into modern-colonial ontology, but also by a resurgent and creative Mapuche world in ongoing recomposition. The environmental dimension of these processes, in the case of Budi, is reflected through a wealth of historic and environmental sources, as well as its still-living oral history, that are yet to be integrated in a micro-historical narrative. This research, although historical in perspective, it is also prospective, as it aims to identify commons as “objects” for biocultural restoration, on the basis of historical-environmental dialogue of knowledge, and position them from within, as social-ecological restoration objects towards emerging polycentric environmental governance, led by the Ayllarewe Budi and other vulnerable coastal areas of the Global South. However, such co-production also involves continuous inter-reflexion on the coloniality of environmental knowledge, through a genuinely horizontal dialogue that recognizes the radical diversity, and at the same time, equal standing, of indigenous knowledge systems.

An extensive scholarship on water commons explores the provision, use, and sustainability of freshwater. However, freshwater commons (rivers, lakes, floodplains, among others) are also sites of critically important food systems – fisheries and aquaculture – which are increasingly affected by climate change. To understand climate change experiences in these freshwater food commons, we conducted 32 semi-structured interviews with key informants who have expertise in diverse freshwater food systems in 20 different countries. The interviews explored climate change hazards, impacts, and adaptations, as well as the social, economic, and environmental contexts in which they play out. The results demonstrate that, while there are some similarities with climate change experiences in marine and coastal fisheries and aquaculture, the ways in which climate change affects freshwater food commons is uniquely shaped by the historical and current governance of freshwater proper, to which commons scholarship has traditionally attended. For example, in many cases, climate change impacts on the food security and livelihoods of actors in freshwater fisheries and aquaculture cannot be understood separately from the histories of exclusion, marginalization, and environmental degradation associated with the development of dams for hydropower or irrigation. Efforts to disentangle the additive, multiplicative, and even moderating effects of climate change vis-à-vis other drivers are not only analytically fraught but also politically charged. Adding to the complexity, freshwater food systems are intricately linked with terrestrial systems, including through many mixed fishing-agricultural livelihoods. In this context, our paper details how actors adapt to multifaceted changes by utilizing a bricolage of heterogeneous institutional, material, and ideological elements to attempt to maintain their food security and livelihoods. The results point to the importance of attending to multiple, overlapping terrestrial and aquatic commons when analyzing climate change impacts in freshwater commons

New York City, like many other coastal metropolitan areas, is facing several interrelated impacts of climate change, including sea level rise, more intense and frequent storms, and coastal and inland flooding. Combined with long histories of human-induced transformation and degradation, climate change threatens the capacities of New York’s urban-coastal ecosystems to provide benefits for human and non-human communities. Moreover, climate change intersects with ongoing patterns of (uneven) development and urbanization in ways that challenge public access to waterfronts and coastal spaces, making it difficult for some groups of people to sustain culturally important activities at the water’s edge. In this challenging context, diverse collectives are coming together in NYC to advance environmental stewardship initiatives that generate more equitable human-environment relationships in the city. Some of the key actors are city, state and federal governments, sometimes operating in overlapping jurisdictions, which makes their work valuable for understandings of polycentric governance. Other important actors include community-based organizations, non-profits, university centers, and grassroots activists. Many of them are working together to develop innovative approaches for coping with environmental change and caring for non-human communities as much as human ones. Importantly, they are also working to achieve more just and inclusive environmental stewardship (e.g., enhancing participation, improving access, preserving culturally important connections to the environment). This talk will draw on several local cases to demonstrate how, through this work, both new and longstanding organizations in the city are enacting vital forms of commoning that challenge status quo environmental management and climate adaptation. Reading these local cases through the lens of commoning as well as through the insights of urban political ecology scholarship on the production of nature, the talk will also highlight the role that these various efforts play in disrupting dominant processes of urbanization (and thereby making possible forms of alter-urbanization). In doing so, the talk will examine how these forms of commoning serve as sites for imagining and enacting alternative climate futures in coastal-urban worlds.