Thinking the Commons through Ostrom and Butler: Boundedness and Vulnerability

Velicu, Irina; García-López, Gustavo

doi:10.1177/0263276418757315

Cited by 55 publications

(43 citation statements)

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“…how power relations, structural conditions and past experiences influence people's perception of (and relation to) themselves and others (ibid, 5). Velicu and García-López (2018) describe 'commoning as a relational politics that engages with humans' boundedness and mutual vulnerability as well as with the performativity of such subjectivities'. Hence we understand commoning as everyday practices rather than institutional set ups, as a 'set of processes/relations enacted to challenge capitalist hegemony and build more just/sustainable societies insofar as it transforms and rearranges common sense in/through practices' (García López et al 2017, 88).…”

Section: Collective Resource Management and Feminist Political Ecologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Butlerian tradition applied to the commons engages with "bounded selves" (cf. Velicu and García-López 2018), in contrast to institutional design studies which have been reliant on economic rationalities. Hence, FPE can demonstrate how gender norms and social relations shape participation, rules and practices of collective farming.…”

Section: Collective Resource Management and Feminist Political Ecologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Critical theoretical approaches are increasingly used to understand the governance of the commons as political (Clement 2010;Bennett et al 2018;Brisbois et al 2018), affective and relational (Mosse 1997;Nightingale 2011a;Singh 2017). However, to date, commons governance has hardly been reviewed critically through a feminist theory and framing of social relationships (Velicu and García-López 2018). The growing body of feminist political ecology (hereafter, FPE) has the potential to shed light on how intra-household and community relationships across scales, intersectionality and emotional attachment affect commons governance, and how they influence outcomes for environmental and social justice (Nightingale 2011a,b;Clement et al 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2019

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Collective farming has been suggested as a potentially useful approach for reducing inequality and transforming peasant agriculture. In collectives, farmers pool land, labor, irrigation infrastructure, agricultural inputs and harvest to overcome resource constraints and to increase their bargaining power. Employing a feminist political ecology lens, we reflect on the extent to which collective farming enables marginalized groups to engage in smallholder agriculture. We examine the establishment of 18 farmer collectives by an action research project in the Eastern Gangetic Plains, a region characterised by fragmented and small landholdings and a high rate of marginalised and landless farmers. We analyze ambivalances of collective farming practices with regard to (1) social relations across 106 Stephanie Leder et al. scales, (2) intersectionality and (3) emotional attachment. Our results in Saptari/ Eastern Terai in Nepal, Madhubani/Bihar, and Cooch Behar/West Bengal in India demonstrate how intra-household, group and community relations and emotional attachments to the family and neighbors mediate the redistribution of labor, land, produce and capital. We find that unequal gender relations, intersected by class, age, ethnicity and caste, are reproduced in collective action, land tenure and water management, and argue that a critical feminist perspective can support a more reflective and relational understanding of collective farming processes. Our analysis demonstrates that feminist political ecology can complement commons studies by providing meaningful insights on ambivalences around approaches such as collective farming.

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Section: Collective Resource Management and Feminist Political Ecologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Collective Resource Management and Feminist Political Ecologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2019

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“…Similarly, in an introduction to a special issue on power and institutions in World Development, Kashwan and coauthors describe a detailed matrix of the different potential types of power regarding institutions, with three dimensions of power for each of four types of power: power over, cooptation from below, institution crafting, and counter-power or resistance (2018). The following special issue provides a number of examples of studies that investigate power and institutions at a range of scales and in many contexts (Brisbois, Morris et al 2019, García-López 2018, Kashwan, MacLean et al 2019.…”

Section: Type 2: the Apolitical Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many contemporary commons scholars analyze the process of the shift towards sustainability, assessing the political and governance outcomes, rather than assume sustainability to be good (Patterson, Schulz et al 2017). Some contemporary commons scholarship challenges neoliberal assumptions by using Judith Butler's idea of performance to argue that performing "commoning" is an anti-hegemonic form of resisting neoliberalism (García López, Velicu et al 2017, Velicu andGarcía-López 2018). Butler's performativity is usefully ambiguous between showing (e.g., performing a play) and doing (e.g., performing an action); performativity here is to be created and upheld by repetitive practices (Butler 1997, Butler 1999, Butler, Laclau et al 2000.…”

Section: Type 4: the Normative Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

Critical Commons Scholarship: A Typology

Quintana¹,

Campbell²

2019

International Journal of the Commons

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Common-pool resource theory (CPR theory) emerged to understand the limitations of the tragedy of the commons narrative, and the theory of human behavior underlying it. Over time, diverse critiques of CPR theory have also emerged. Prominent critiques include inattention to power and coercion, assumptions that institutions can be crafted, and analyses that exclude history and context, among others. We label this literature critical commons scholarship. In this review paper, we define a typology of five types of critical commons scholarship. The functionalist critique (type 1) argues that a narrow focus on institutions that excludes history, context, and contingencies causes erroneous conclusions about the causes of resource sustainability. The apolitical management critique (type 2) argues that a focus on resource sustainability causes commons scholars to ignore how power is used to create and maintain inequalities through rules and norms structuring resource access. The methodological critique (type 3) argues that methodological incompatibilities, such as CPR theory's dependence on general, abstract models, necessarily prevent these scholars from responding to type 1 and type 2 critiques. The project of government critique (type 4) argues that common-pool resource theory is used to support neoliberal and hegemonic practices. Finally, the ethical critique (type 5) argues that commonpool resource theory is premised on problematic north-south relationships where expert scholars in the global north provide information to be consumed by "commoners" in the global south. Mainstream CPR theory has been limited in engaging with critical commons scholarship, but there are new tools (such as the social-ecological systems framework and the critical institutionalism approach) for addressing each type of critique. Our goal in developing this typology is to make critiques of CPR theory legible and potentially actionable, while acknowledging the challenges associated with addressing them.

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Commons Regimes at the Crossroads: Environmental Justice Movements and Commoning

Villamayor-Tomás¹,

García-López

D’Alisa

2023

Studies in Ecological Economics

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In this chapter, we offer an overview of the scholarship at the interface of commons regimes and social movements and unveil the agenda of the Barcelona School around this topic. The frontiers of theory and research on the governance of commons have notably evolved in the last decade. At the forefront of such evolution is the study of environmental conflicts around the use and management of common resources. Social movements are one means through which such conflicts manifest in relation to the discourse and practice of commons governance. As we claim here, key in this evolution has been the contributions of Joan Martínez Alier and others around the environmentalism of the poor, environmental justice movements, and alternatives to “growth”. Important research programs within the new scholarship, and scholars within the School in particular (See Sect. 19.3 where we identify the initiatives and scholars associated to this), include the study of interactions between mobilization and community-based natural resource management regimes in rural contexts; the emergence and consolidation of new urban commons; the study of processes of commoning and becoming a commoner; and the connections between commons and the degrowth scholarship.

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Thinking the Commons through Ostrom and Butler: Boundedness and Vulnerability

Cited by 55 publications

References 55 publications

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

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

Critical Commons Scholarship: A Typology

Commons Regimes at the Crossroads: Environmental Justice Movements and Commoning

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