(Re)building historical commons : Exploring forest commoning as a transformative practice in the Northwestern Iberian Peninsula

Abstract

Table of contents CHAPTER 1 Introduction1.1. Commons and sustainability transformations 1.2.Towards an integrated framework to study forest commoning 1.3.Methodology: a place-based participatory research 1.4.Case study selection and characteristics 1.5.Data collection and analysis: a progressive contextualization 1.6.Outline of the thesis CHAPTER 2 Historical commons as sites of transformation. A critical research agenda to study human and more-than-human communities 'If our species does not survive the ecological crisis, it will probably be due to our failure... to work out new ways to live with the earth, to rework ourselves... We will go onwards in a different mode of humanity, or not at all' 13 Within these ethics and values, however, the commoners' agency is relational, influenced by their (power) position in the network of relations and their daily interactions with others. This relational understanding of agency and community transcends the usual divisions between self and community, between the human and non-human, allowing the development of a richer understanding of agency, one that is able to better incorporate the manifold political, social, moral, and affective dimensions of agency (Nightingale 2011).Further elaborating on the work of such authors as Singh (2018b), Nightingale (2019) and García-López et al. ( 2021), I conceptualise commoning in this thesis as a socio-natural process of reconnecting communities to forests. This includes fostering caring and responsible attitudes towards forests that create political more-thanhuman communities. This approach denaturalizes forests, turning the human-forest relationship itself into the main object of study. Commoning socio-natural practices in forests contribute to the (re)production of communities in terms of livelihoods, but they also (re)create identities, cultures and political subjectivities. Socio-natural practices are thus 'affective', indicating how commoners, communities and forests are co-constituted through commoning practices.The main question that guides this research is the following:• How does commoning help us to better understand and enhance the agency of commoners in community forests and their contribution to sustainability transformations?The purpose of this overarching question is to focus on the development a model of agency that better explains why and how people engage with community forests and the practices, meanings and outcomes that emerge from this. In this way, the relevance and role of community forests -or better, the commoning initiatives emerging within these contexts -to sustainability transformations can be analysed and discussed in a critical manner. The focus is thus the agency of commoners and the in-between process by which forest and commoners are co-constituted; it does not include ecological measurements that quantify forest change.Place-based research can identify the structures that limit sustainability transformations and need to be changed. The implementation of policies and practices can only find its most ...