Session 9. 2. A.

Nobel laureate and commons scholar Elinor Ostrom found that trust, reciprocity, and institutions are key for managing and conserving environmental commons such as natural resources. Yet, more research is needed for understanding what factors might motivate and sustain collective action for creating commons produced through commoning such as climate justice? Commoning is a phenomenon where actors create new shared and relational processes, redesign institutions such as norms and rules around a shared interest to serve a common good, as well as develop new imaginaries of sharing and caring. Thus, care unfolds not only as a motivation for climate justice but also embeds itself in commoning to sustain a sense of community and support.
In our research on youth groups in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), we uncover the practices of care that emerge at the intersection of commoning and climate justice through an intersectional lens of race, gender, immigration status, and sexuality, by applying Fisher and Tronto's ethic of care that includes actions of the powerful such as caring about and caring for, and actions of the less powerful such as caregiving and care-receiving. In doing so, we draw attention to uneven power dynamics in youth groups.
Our findings highlight the multi-dimensionality and complexity of care through intersecting identities and experiences of young people who are actively developing new ways of fostering resilience and creating inclusive spaces for sustaining commoning for climate justice. At the same time, uneven power dynamics in caregiving between White people and racialized people in youth groups suggest that even the practice of youth-led commoning can reproduce and maintain patterns of marginality. Our findings provide new insights about the connections between commoning and care for building and maintaining relationships and trust for motivating and sustaining long-term collective action.

Commoning is expected to shape both individual subjectivities and relationships, creating possibilities for broader social transformation (Dombroski et al. 2023; Singh 2017; Varvarousis and Kallis 2017). These processes include recognition—or intentional creation—of interdependency through sharing something and the development of a sense of mutuality, both toward one another and in the joint responsibility for whatever they share. Care is widely recognized as important in commoning, and commoning as being 'care-'full' or full of care (inter alia, Dombroski et al. 2019; Gibson-Graham et al. 2013; Lejano 2023; Sciarelli 2024; Trogal 2017; Williams 2020). At the same time, blind spots and inequalities that bedevil care work also occur within commoning, as in society more broadly (Anderson and Huron 2023; Blau 2021; Nightingale 2019; Noterman 2016; Tummers and MacGregor 2019).

To make sense of the varied relations among commoning, caring, and subjectivity, we consider both the various forms or “phases” of care acknowledged in the literature (Fisher and Tronto 1990; Tronto 2013) and those observed in settings where caring and commoning involve strangers (e.g., Alam and Houston 2020; Huron 2015). We demonstrate that only "caring with" necessarily supports commoning, given how it both arises from and (re)produces interdependency, which fosters a sense of mutuality. We suggest that caring with not only supports commoning but is an inherent – albeit not the only – component of commoning.

We then identify conditions associated with caring with and commoning in the context of open urban spaces. Caring with in socially open contexts depends on its visibility and organization. In these settings, the visibility of collective care supports recognition of sharing and interdependency, whereas organizing care in ways that are inclusive and non-hierarchical fosters relationships based on mutuality. Differential care may support commoning by welcoming people to participate in taking and giving care, allowing them to "become commoners" (Singh 2017; cf., Dombroski et al. 2018). Differential "caring with," however, threatens commoning, especially over the long term, because it involves hierarchy (cf., Noterman 2016). An exploration of the commoning practices of two movements associated with urban green spaces in Montréal illustrates variation in caring within commoning, as well as how the visibility and organization of caring influence commoning and socio-natural relations.

Ostrom (1990) has focused on what principles commoners tend to require in order to succeed and be sustainable. More recent research has started to identify patterns of commoning that include “how” people work/ are together (Bollier & Helfrich 2019). Bollier and Helfrich (2019) have focused on how commoning is mainly about the maintenance of relationships. It is in this context they have identified different ways of what I call “working togetherness” such sociocracy and consent. While Habermann (2024:15) highlights how “commoning means taking care in common of the needs of life, and/ or reproducing them” and offers a theoretical analysis of the intersection of commoning and exploitation from an intersectional perspective, empirical analyses on the nexus between collective ways of working and caring from an intersectional perspective are still missing. In this article, I explore commoners’ reflections on their “working togetherness”; including potentials and also limitations on intersectional and just transformations - and how those moving within commoning spaces feel about them in terms of their creation of fair(er) relationships. The basis of these findings is a growing data set on commoners in and around Berlin, Germany.

Contemporary social movements often realize power as they “scale up” –convincing ever-larger swathes of population to unite in actions and demands for change from powerful entities. This outward-facing action contrasts with another kind of social movement activity: building and sustaining local institutions for self-determination and self-governance. We call this work commoning. Commoning is particularly relevant for structurally marginalized communities in a neo-colonial world. Comunidades por la Autonomía (Communities for Autonomy) is an informal, volunteer organization founded in 2023 by Indigenous Mexican activists to assist Indigenous communities in the Yucatan peninsula in developing robust institutions as a form of territorial defense and self-determination. In this research, we (self-) examine the inward-focused commoning work of Comunidades por la Autonomia and its engagement of insights from the Ostrom school of commons research. We then relate this inward-focused commoning activism to the outward facing work of social movement power-building and policy change.