Session 9. 2. B.

The customary land ownership system entrenched in African societies means that chieftaincy continues to be powerful in decisions about land use and management of communal land. With chiefs as custodians of just under 80 percent of the land in Ghana, their responses to the government’s recent land-change initiatives (purportedly to advance development) raise several important questions about inequalities and the absence of democratic processes, particularly as the executive and judicial authority embedded in a single person allows custodians considerable powers in allocating or managing communal land. This paper draws on field research conducted in the Shae-butter-producing region of Northern Ghana to examine the impact of land-use changes on the livelihood of women Shae-butter producers in Northern Ghana, focusing on collective action responses to land custodial powers and decision-making. This paper explores how decisions around changes to communal lands threaten economic security, increase feelings of alienation, and reinforce gender inequalities in rural communities in Northern Ghana. I conclude by addressing how community members and the state should respond to better protect the interests of those whose livelihoods depend on access to communal land.

Amidst the growing environmental challenges in urban India, ecological restoration has emerged as a strategic response, with Bengaluru at the forefront, particularly through the rejuvenation of its historical, man-made lakes. However, critical scholarship reveals that these initiatives often perpetuate exclusionary practices, marginalizing traditional communities and the urban poor by restricting their access and rights to these commons, while privileging an elite, aesthetically oriented vision of urban environments. This article examines the ecorestoration of Kempambudhi Lake, one of Bengaluru’s oldest waterbodies, and analyzes how processes of exclusion and marginalization manifest within the project, thereby undermining the inclusive potential of an ecologically sensitive urban commons and transforming it into a contested social space.
Drawing on the theoretical framework of Situated Urban Political Ecology (SUPE), the article explores how power relations between the State, corporate actors, environmental NGOs (ENGOs), and local communities play out in the restoration process. The research adopts qualitative methodologies, including in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, oral histories, and spatial mapping of the lake.
The findings highlight two key factors exacerbating social-political contestations at the Kempambudhi Lake ecorestoration project. The first is the social fragmentation in civil society engagement – driven by caste-based politics, class hierarchies, migration trends, and encroachment disputes – that marginalizes the urban poor and traditional communities from accessing the lake and participating in the restoration under the guise of environmental protection. This fragmentation facilitates the consolidation of a State-Corporate-ENGO nexus, which brings a power shift in the project and widens the fragmentation among the local actors to monopolize the lake-space and promote a capital-intensive restoration model. This model prioritizes environmental aesthetics and economic enhancement, sidelining the ecological and social justice considerations.
Based on findings, the paper argues that ecorestoration process on the ground creates a “geometry of power” through the interaction between the state, market, and civil society actors, which potentially deepen the marginalization of alternative epistemologies and ecological practices around the lake. This power dynamic not only limits the lake’s potential as a common urban resource but also relegates environmental justice concerns to the periphery of the restoration discourse.

Women in many communities face systemic discrimination and structural inequalities that prevent them from fully accessing and controlling Commons like community forests. Historically relegated to subordinate roles, women are often seen as mere 'beneficiaries' or 'labourers' rather than ‘decision-makers’ and ‘stewards’. This exclusion from decision-making processes exacerbates their vulnerability to exploitation, violence, and denial of a dignified life. Yet, women's participation in the governance system is crucial for the sustainability and conservation of these Commons.

In India, the Forest Rights Act (2006) provides communities, including women, legal recognition and rights to conserve, manage, and govern community forests. However, women are often included in governance structures like Community Forest Rights Management Committees (CFRMCs) only symbolically. Their involvement is frequently tokenistic, with little genuine influence on decisions.

In the tribal-dominated villages of Dhenkanal district, Odisha, an initiative aimed to change this has been started by the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) by encouraging women to take on leadership roles within the CFRMCs. The aim is to foster a mindset shift—encouraging them to question why they have been excluded from the decision-making process. When contested, women demonstrated deep ecological knowledge and a very close relationship with the forest. They identified a far greater number of species—140 to 150—compared to men, who identified only 90 to 100 species. While women are seen going to the forest for 180 to 190 days, men are seen going for 90 to 100 days, which is reflected in women's knowledge of the forest’s biodiversity, seasonal changes, and sustainable harvesting practices and proved invaluable in forest management discussions.

As a result, women now hold leadership positions in about 60 to 65 villages, playing an active role in forest protection, restoration planning, and governance. This shift not only empowers women but also strengthens the sustainability of community-managed forests. Valuing women’s contributions and ensuring their rightful place in governance structures is creating a just, inclusive, and effective resource management systems that benefit both communities and ecosystems.

Scholarly material on the boundary of the commons-based on its access regimes and institutional design are still minimal. This has been a point of contention by geographers such as David Harvey (Harvey, 2011), critiquing Ostrom for stating that Commons have boundaries (Ostrom, 2015). Some of the problems with such critique lie in the imprecision in the conceptualisation of commons that vary in different disciplines, where communal conception (resources open to all) is used interchangeably with the distributive conception (interest-based communities). The communal conception positions the sociability within the commons as an abstract notion of ‘the crowd’ and their right to access public goods where their interest are framed as universal statistics. Cohen frames communal commons as having obligations within institutional systems such as policy and law (Vrousalis, 2015) which is close to public good logic. Distributive conception (Hussain, 2018) articulates the commons as an environment where its members are interest-based (have clear common ground) and are engaged in direct interpersonal relations. The latter offers an environment for discussion and deliberation in the articulation of needs, resources, and self-governing regimes. As such, distributive commons will have various insides and outsides. As a paradigm that sits outside the open to all conception and private enclosure, how do we design the boundaries of the such commons? This paper will start by theoretically defining the difference between the communal and distributive commons to set the context for the discussion on boundaries. It positions the boundary as an institutional threshold with various boundary conditions that requires consideration in organisational design and governance. Although a larger set of considerations will be presented the following four elements will be discussed in detail: 1) Social access regimes, 2) Resource sharing practices, 3) Knowledge, and 4) boundaries as barriers to co-option by state or market.

Bibliography
Harvey, D. 2011. The Future of the Commons. Radical History Review, Volume 2011, issue 109, Duke University Pres
Ostrom, E. 2015. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press
Vrousalis, N. 2015The Political Philosophy of G. A. Cohen: Back to Socialist Basics. Bloomsbury Press.
Hussain, W., 2018. The Common Good. In: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1st ed. Toronto: Stanford University.
Popescu, G., 2018. Bordering and ordering the twenty-first century. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, In