Commoning for inclusion? commons, exclusion, property and socio-natural becomings

Abstract

As a response to the march of privatization and neoliberal individualism, the commons have recently re-emerged as an attractive alternative. In this article, I bring a feminist political ecology critique to the burgeoning literature on c ommoning to develop a conceptualisation of how political communities of commoning emerge through socionatural subjectification and affective relations. All commoning efforts involve a renegotiation of the (contested) political relationships through which everyday community affairs, production and exchange are organised and governed. Drawing on critical property studies, diverse economies, feminist theory and commoning literatures, this analysis critically explores the relationship between property and commoning to reveal how the commons emerge from the exercise of power. Central to my conceptualisation is that commoning is a set of practices and performances that foster new relations and subjectivities, but these relations are always contingent, ambivalent outcomes of the exercise of power. As such, commoning creates socionatural inclusions and exclusions, and any moment of coming together can be succeeded by new challenges and relations that uncommon. I argue for the need to focus on doing commoning, becoming in common, rather than seeking to cement property rights, relations of sharing and collective practices as the backbone of durable commoning efforts. Becoming in common then, is a partial, transitory becoming, one which needs to be (re)performed to remain stable over time and space.

Feminist political ecologies of the commons and commoning (Editorial to the Special Feature)

“…Following this understanding of power, one of FPE's focus is how communities respond to socio-natural and economic changes in everyday struggles and political organising for well-being in situations of inequality, exclusion and economic poverty (Nightingale 2019). In addition, an FPE perspective pays particular attention to the narrative or framing of community and collective in relation to climate, economic and environmental changes, enabling a gendered analysis of how power relations determine as well as are co-determined by change processes at scale (Shrestha et al 2019).…”

“…Lastly, Nightingale (2011) challenges the dominant understanding that cooperation within common property debates is 'rational' by showing how emotions expressed through bodies of Scottish fishermen in multiple spaces, from the boats and the community to the meeting room with policy makers, shape diverse and complex cooperation modes. Three contributions to this special issue (Harcourt 2019;Leder et al 2019;Nightingale 2019) explore this line of research further.…”

“…Two notable emerging lines push FPE's multiscale and multispace approaches further. 2 One line of investigation draws on non-dualistic concepts, such as naturecultures (Haraway 2008) or socionature (Braun 2002;Nightingale 2019), new materialism and material feminism (see Elmhirst 2015), and queer ecologies (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010) along with other posthumanist theories (see examples of multispecies commoning by Sato and Soto Alarcón 2019). Another line explores commons types beyond the biophysical.…”

The ambivalent political work of emotions in the defence of territory, life and the commons

“…This lack of attention towards the role of emotions has generated an incomplete understanding of how power operates both in practices of commoning and related to how these practices are disturbed when local communities and collectives face conflict and engage in mobilisation. Only recently, scholars are highlighting the central role that the lived experience by means of emotions, memories and care have for the daily maintenance of the commons (Eizenberg, 2011;Nightingale, 2011Nightingale, , 2019Pratt, 2012;Singh, 2013Singh, , 2017. This focus is letting us better understand how local communities engage in caring for and conserving their commons (Singh, 2018), as well as how and why people with a strong emotional attachment to their commons, may however contradictorily, overexploit them (Nightingale, 2013).…”

Ambivalences of collective farming: Feminist political ecologies from the Eastern Gangetic Plains

“…We assume that existing commoning practices opened up spaces for emotional attachment to neighbors and community members, which now encourage groups to take risks again together despite crop failure. Deeply emotional, affective relations between individuals "supported the collective in times of crisis", as Nightingale (2019) suggests. Rather than institutional rules and economic logics, emotions or "alternative rationalities (…) develop informal modes of cooperation" (Nightingale 2011a), e.g.…”