The International Association of the Study of the Commons (“IASC”) is the leading professional association dedicated to research and practice around “the Commons”. The association, founded in 1989, is devoted to bringing together multi-disciplinary researchers, practitioners, and policymakers for the purpose of improving governance and management, advancing understanding, and creating sustainable solutions for commons, common-pool resources, or any other form of shared resource. These resources may be part of the natural world (e.g. forests, water, fish stock, climate systems) or they may be created (e.g. infrastructures such as irrigation systems, digitally stored knowledge, or technologies such as open source software, hardware or blockchain systems).
While our IASC community and IASC biennial conferences [1] has brought active attention to the study and practice of “the Commons” and “Commoning” since IASC’s formation in 1989, it could be argued that bringing awareness to these topics and ideas in all regions of the world has never been more pressing. Moreover, the ideas of Commons and Commoning are more apparent in some IASC regions than others. Arguably, people and policy-makers in the United States are less aware of these concepts compared to our colleagues in regions like Europe, Africa or Oceania, for example. In addition, enclosure of commons continues across all IASC regions, often unabated. That is why our overarching theme of the IASC 2025 conference is entitled
“Regenerating the Commons: Addressing Pressing Concerns Through Learning about the Past and Innovating into the Future.”
Given the pressing need to spread the word about the innovations that are happening in the area of Commons and Commoning, this year, we encourage each of our IASC members to help recruit someone new or unfamiliar with IASC to join our community and participate in our ongoing and upcoming dialogs. Our goal: to get over the 1000 IASC member mark by our June 2025 conference and have the most lively IASC conference yet!
Thank you to everyone who is contributing already to make this event possible, and we hope to see you in person at IASC 2025 in Amherst, Massachusetts USA or if not there, in person through the hybrid online components we will offer.
– Michael Cox, Dartmouth College, Conference Program Chair
– Charlie Schweik, University of Massachusetts Amherst, General Conference Chair
[1] The first in-person IASC International Conference was held at Duke University in North America in September 1990. The conference moves every two years to a different continent. More recently, it was Europe in 2017 (the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands), South America (Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima, Peru) in 2019, and after a pandemic delay of in-person events in 2021, Africa (University of Nairobi in Kenya) in 2023.
