132 accepted panels across 13 themes, plus 3 special sessions.

Forests remain vital commons that sustain the livelihoods, food security, energy needs and cultural identities of millions of Indigenous and local communities. However, increasing pressure from agricultural expansion, fuelwood extraction, climate change, commercial interests and changing tenure arrangements continue to threaten both forest ecosystems and the institutions that have historically governed them. While conservation and decentralisation initiatives have sought to address forest degradation, many have overlooked the importance of continuous collective learning. Building on the commons scholarship of collective action and local institutions, this panel explores how participatory learning platforms can strengthen commoning by creating enduring spaces where communities, researchers, practitioners and policymakers collectively reflect, share knowledge, negotiate trade-offs and co-produce locally appropriate governance solutions. Particular attention will be given to how these processes can enhance forest governance while supporting livelihoods within the energy-food nexus.

The panel welcomes theoretical, empirical and practice-based contributions that examine the relationships between forest commons and livelihoods across diverse contexts. Contributions that examine community institutions for forest governance, participatory and social learning, forest tenure reforms and decentralisation, and the relationship between commoning and conservation are welcome. The panel also welcomes papers on non-timber forest products, transitions to alternative energy sources that reduce pressure on forests, and governance innovations that promote both ecological sustainab

Dry forest-grassland mosaics include the miombo and mopane woodlands spanning much of Southern Africa. These landscapes are multifunctional, underpinning the livelihoods of over 300 million people while playing critical roles in biodiversity conservation and climate regulation. Yet they face accelerating degradation driven by agricultural expansion, charcoal production, climate change, and weak governance, with deforestation rates among the highest in Africa.

This panel examines the complex socioecological outcomes of restoration efforts across Southern Africa, drawing on empirical research from Malawi and South Africa. Recent scholarship shows that restoration success is not determined by biophysical metrics alone but hinges on institutional alignment, tenure security, and benefit-sharing mechanisms. Participatory forest management and community-based conservation models show promise, yet implementation remains scanty and often excludes women and marginalised groups. Scaling successful practices demands: (i) recognition and integration of local knowledge and customary tenure systems; (ii) institutional support for collaborative governance; (iii) equitable benefit-sharing from restoration-linked value chains; and (iv) adaptive monitoring frameworks that capture distributional effects across households.

The panel will interrogate how restoration interventions can move beyond project-based approaches toward inclusive, rights-based strategies that reconcile ecological recovery with livelihood security. By positioning tenure and social equity at the fulcrum of this discussion, we explore pathways for restoration that deliver just and sustainable outcomes for the region's forest-dependent communities.

Global policy agendas heavily emphasize forest restoration through tree planting as a primary strategy to address climate change, conserve biodiversity, and support livelihoods. However, these restoration initiatives often prioritize target-based tree planting as a technical undertaking over a short period of time, often reducing inherent socio-political processes and cultural dimensions to secondary status. Drawing on empirical research from around the world, this panel critically examines political-economic and socio-cultural conditions required for effective and equitable restoration in forest commons for long-term sustainable and resilient outcomes.

The panel is intended to generate comparative, cross-regional conversations about what genuine people-centered restoration on forest commons would require in order to chart actionable, social justice-oriented pathways for global forest restoration.

This panel speaks directly to the conference’s overarching call to center resilience, resistance and collective action in the commons by engaging with enduring debates within commons scholarship about who benefits from and who bears the costs of restoration interventions on collectively governed forest.

The panel is designed as a cross-thematic session, anchored in theme 1 (Forests, livelihoods and tenure) with explicitly links to themes 6 (Democracy and the commons: State, civil society and communities), 7 (Commons at risk: Climate change, disasters and pathways to resilience) and 8 (Constitutionality: Bottom-up crafting institutions for the commons under pressure).

National-international multi-actor collaboration has garnered widespread attention and hope for addressing humanity’s environmental crisis and sustainability challenges by incorporating approaches such as global protected area expansion, de-growth, decarbonization, innovation, and nature-based solutions. However, given how these practices are unfolding on the ground, some of these actions may represent a strategic expansion of neoliberal and capitalist logics across the global-local nexus. Considerable hype, hope, and frustration surrounding area-based conservation, carbon trading, market-based approaches, and the “sustainable” neo-extractive expansion into remote forests and Indigenous and community lands is leading to further displacement, dispossession and environmental and social injustice. On the other side, some communities are developing counter-narratives and forms of resistance informed by their previous experiences of displacement and dispossession. Political ecologists have long been at the forefront of discussions surrounding the power and politics mobilized in resource governance and environmental struggles as well as how these dynamics perpetuate the very reasons, systems, and structures that created these environmental and social problems in the first place.

Against this backdrop, we invite abstract submissions that discuss, debate, and critically explore how neoliberal and neo-extractivist regimes, uneven development, and area-based conservation models/discousres are materializing in the Global South and shaping formal–informal institutional nexuses, everyday resistance and lived experiences, land tenure and traditional livelihoods, counter narratives, with lessons learned and implications for just and equitable governance of forest commons.

The relationship between Indigenous Peoples and their customary lands, forests, and territories extends beyond ownership; it constitutes a vital institution sustaining socio-ecological and cultural continuity. Yet, this relationship is embedded in asymmetrical power relations shaped by capitalist expansion and state and corporate control over Indigenous territories. These power relations determine who can define, control, access, use, and benefit from land and forests.

In this context, the recognition regime remains conditional, sectoral, and shaped by political-economic interests. Recognition often accommodates state claims over land and forests rather than affirming the historical rights of Indigenous Peoples. The paradox becomes evident when national interests and development are invoked to legitimize the appropriation and dispossession of Indigenous territories, while communal interests are framed as particularistic claims.

This paper advances an institutional political ecology approach to examine these dynamics. It argues for a paradigm shift from selective to full recognition grounded in rights, socio-spatial evidence, and tenurial justice. A critical foundation is the documentation of Indigenous Peoples’ territorial knowledge by the communities themselves. Over nearly two decades, BRWA has registered 2,284 customary territory maps covering approximately 36.6 million hectares across 32 provinces and 209 districts/cities. The paper explores how spatial evidence, social histories, customary institutions, and power relations can be integrated to advance substantive, equitable, and sustainable state recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ rights.

Commoning is a social process where resource access and use are continuously negotiated. In biodiversity conservation, this is complex due to overlapping interests involving protection, local livelihoods, and commercialization through tourism and carbon trading. This panel asks how commoning occurs and what factors shape it within these spaces. Understanding commoning also requires examining the actors involved. Neither local communities nor the state act as single homogeneous entities. Communities consist of diverse groups with different class interests, while state policies emerge from bargaining among institutions with varying mandates. Although the state retains considerable authority to regulate access, local communities also actively negotiate available spaces to secure their rights.

The panel features four papers demonstrating how commoning is continuously negotiated. Haidar et al. examine state fragmentation and bureaucratic rivalry in mangrove rehabilitation, showing how shifting rules constrain stable local practices. Sakai highlights inequity in protected forest tourism within social forestry scheme, revealing that collective action may not accommodate all community groups. Syahroni et al. investigate the commercialization of conservation areas, showing how this drives new enclosures that reshape commoning practices. And, Arafat et al. analyze forestry partnerships, demonstrating that formal rights do not guarantee actual access. Overall, commoning in conservation occurs to varying degrees shaped by state/local fragmentation or market pressures. The panel closes by questioning if commoning concepts should be extended to encompass the intrinsic value and ecological functions of ecosystems beyond purely human relations.

World's commons — forests, watersheds, and the non-timber forest products they yield — sustain millions of rural and Indigenous people, yet face extraction, fragmented policy, and undervaluation. Investment, when it comes, too often bypasses the communities who depend on and tend to these landscapes. For companies with global supply chains, that fragility is also a business risk: unstable supply, climate exposure, and insecure sourcing. Addressing this means shifting from fragmented, project-based interventions to investment at the scale of the whole landscape — its ecological, social, and economic systems.

Sequencing public, philanthropic, and private capital is one way forward: government de-risks through infrastructure, tenure, and policy; philanthropic and impact capital act as patient catalysts for pilots and institutional capacity; private actors, in turn, gain supply stability, climate-risk mitigation, and secure sourcing. Early Indian pilots show the approach at work: a Social Success Note financing multi-layer natural farming in Odisha, and the Bamboo Village model in Meghalaya.

The panel brings together actors from state, civil society, business, and communities from across South and Southeast Asia to ask: how might we imagine an investment design that treats the commons not as a new frontier for capital, but places community institutions, tenure security, and collective decision-making at its centre? What institutional arrangements enable communities to negotiate with states, markets, and investors on more equitable terms? How can investment strengthen, rather than displace, locally crafted rules and tenure systems? And what does it take to move from project-based interventions towards durable, community-governed landscape economies?

This panel highlights the landmark 2007 Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling, a monumental victory co-led by Jabini that established a global precedent for indigenous and tribal land rights against state-sanctioned resource exploitation. Attendees will gain critical insights into how the Saamaka community mobilized legally and traditionally to protect their ancestral rainforests from unlawful logging and mining operations. Furthermore, the session will address the modern challenges of implementing these legal protections, emphasizing the vital role of grassroots activism and international human rights frameworks in safeguarding tribal sovereignty and environmental conservation.

The critical struggle for the territorial rights of Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation (PIACI) across the Amazon. This session will explore the landmark achievements and modern challenges in safeguarding these highly vulnerable communities from the existential threats of illegal logging, gold mining, and encroaching state-sanctioned infrastructure.

The role of community territorial funds Territorial funds—autonomous financial mechanisms established by territorial movements—have become a key instrument for ensuring the protection and resilience of territories. Valeria Paye and Rose Apurina will present the strategy and role of Podaali, the first Indigenous territorial fund in the Brazilian Amazon.

Socio-ecological production landscapes (SEPL) across Europe and Japan are transforming under external pressures, shifting local livelihoods toward reliance on external inputs and markets. Forest and agrarian commons, a major component of these landscapes, face complex, often externally imposed governance pressures, from supranational policy mandates and certification regimes to conservation programs and land use planning. Communities holding customary or negotiated rights must navigate arrangements that formally include them while constraining their influence, raising questions about how participation, tenure, and local authority are negotiated in commons governance, and how communities resist externalization to sustain locally embedded resource use.

The GOVFOR project examines these dynamics in Swedish forest governance, focusing on how EU policy pressure reshapes participation, legitimacy, and tenure. The SATOCONN Reconnections project extends this inquiry through a Japan-Europe comparative lens, examining how different SEPL transform under similar pressures of policy change, market restructuring, and demographic shift.

Bringing these projects into dialogue, this panel asks how local authority, tenure security, and meaningful participation are experienced and contested across commons systems and policy contexts. Rather than assuming a single governance pathology, the panel is attentive to how outcomes diverge: overlapping processes accumulate into participatory fatigue in some contexts, negotiation or adaptation in others. Comparing forest and agrarian commons, the panel advances understanding of when participatory governance strengthens, reshapes, or undermines local authority and tenure, and what this means for shared resources and rural livelihoods.

Indigenous Peoples have safeguarded forests, watersheds, grasslands, and other commons for generations through collective governance systems that embody many of the Commons principles. Yet despite their proven role in protecting biodiversity and securing resilient ecosystems, Indigenous communities continue to face persistent threats to their land rights and receive only a small fraction of global climate, conservation, and development finance.

This panel brings together four leaders of funding facilities dedicated to advancing the land rights of Indigenous Peoples. The discussion will explore why secure collective tenure is fundamental to the resilience of the commons and why direct access to funding is essential for strengthening community governance, self-determination, and collective action. Moving resources directly to rights holders enables communities to defend and manage their territories, sustain traditional knowledge systems, and respond to social, environmental, and economic pressures on their own terms.

By examining innovative approaches to direct financing, the session will highlight how funding mechanisms for tenure rights can help empower communities, while advancing justice, resilience, and recognition of collective land rights.

Indigenous Peoples and partners REPALEAC, Strong Roots, CIPRED, and SRUTI present practical, community-led approaches to securing land and forest tenure across Africa and Asia. Speakers showcase participatory mapping, customary law recognition, community stewardship, and gender inclusive governance, illustrating how local institutions define boundaries, make collective decisions, monitor resources, and resolve conflicts. Their stories of struggles and successes highlight clear outcomes: legal recognition of collective rights, reduced forest loss, strengthened local governance, and improved livelihoods. The panel surfaces common barriers and shares peer driven solutions: rights based advocacy, flexible financing, capacity exchanges, and locally rooted dispute mechanisms. The session emphasizes learning exchanges and concrete policy recommendations to scale rights respecting, community driven tenure models that align conservation and human rights. Supported where relevant by the Tenure Facility, this dialogue centers Indigenous leadership and practical pathways for durable tenure security.

Bolivia offers a critical case for examining the transformation of forest commons governance. Over three decades, forest policy moved from a predominantly extractive and sectoral model toward recognition of Indigenous territorial rights, community forest management, the Rights of Mother Earth, and integrated approaches based on systems of life, and more recently toward a renewed reform agenda promoting the commodification of Nature. Yet deforestation, land-use conversion, institutional fragmentation, and conflicts over authority have intensified. The panel asks how successive transformations in forest policy, institutions, community governance, and political economy have reshaped the possibilities for forest commons, and what would be required for these transformations to produce durable commons governance. The papers connect four analytical dimensions: paradigm change and decolonizing forest policy; institutional asymmetries between appropriation and provision, formal rights and effective authority, and land and forest governance; the gap between formal reforms and rules-in-use at community level; and the political economy of forest conversion. Together, they argue that durable forest commons require more than rights recognition or sectoral reform: they require alignment among authority, responsibility, knowledge, livelihood systems, collective action, maintenance and regeneration of systems of life, and long-term stewardship.

This panel assesses the impact of climate change on sustainable land governance through a community-led approach, focusing on the development of the Bhil community with special reference to the Narmada Sardar Sarovar Dam submergence area of Nandurbar District.

The imposition of rigid, terrestrial-centric governance and capitalist extraction in Southeast Asia’s coastal frontiers has precipitated a crisis for the sea nomads (Orang Laut, Sama-Bajau, and Moklen/Moken). Forced sedentarization, exclusionary conservation, and mass tourism threaten their ontological survival, transforming their marine sanctuaries into precarious frontiers. Mainstream development often pathologizes these communities, revealing a profound clash over the conceptualization of the sea as a "commons," also known as the marine commons. Debates surrounding commons theories often rely on fixed boundaries and resource quantification, failing to capture the fluid realities of marine environments. To deconstruct these terrestrial biases, this panel proposes a tripartite analytical framework. First, it employs pluralistic knowledgescapes to counter epistemic violence, positioning diverse, localized epistemologies as foundational to marine management rather than technocratic expertise. Second, it utilizes fluid territorialities and situated governance to critique rigid spatial planning, highlighting the sea nomads' spatial logic of mobility and relational use-rights over capitalist ownership. Third, it applies more-than-human geographies to dismantle anthropocentric dualisms, recognizing marine elements (e.g. waves, wind, and animals) as active agents within socio-natural assemblages. This panel will contribute to debates on the marine commons from a Sea Nomad perspective, framing it as a dynamic, relational, and ontologically plural space, thus shifting the discourse from resource management toward spatial, decolonial, and ontological justice.

Water governance depends on a dynamic interplay of formal rules, informal norms, and everyday practices that shape how communities access, use, and manage water resources. Yet these institutional arrangements are often fragmented across written bylaws, administrative procedures, and customary expectations. This panel brings together scholars applying Institutional Grammar and complementary analytical approaches to advance a shared understanding of how formal and informal institutions jointly structure water systems. IG provides a systematic way to decode institutions—whether found in legal texts, organizational procedures, or community practices—by identifying actors, expectations, and contextual conditions. At the same time, the panel welcomes contributions using social network analysis, quantitative methods, qualitative and interpretive approaches, agent-based modeling, and other tools that illuminate institutional diversity in water governance. Together, these methods help reveal how formal rules interact with informal norms, how authority and responsibility are constituted, and how rules in use emerge, adapt, or conflict with written provisions across community managed systems and multi level regulatory frameworks. This panel is designed to be useful not only for researchers but also for practitioners working in water management, community governance, NGOs, and policy implementation. By bridging analytical tools with real-world governance challenges, the session supports more coherent institutional diagnostics, strengthens comparative analysis, and offers practical insights for designing and improving water governance arrangements.

We invite empirical, methodological, theoretical, and practice-based contributions that advance institutional analysis in water governance.

Across Africa, freshwater and wetland environments sustain livelihoods, ecological systems and cultural practices while becoming increasingly contested through conservation, land-use change, resource extraction, climate pressures and competing claims to authority. These environments are not simply ecological spaces but politically constituted commons whose governance involves states, communities, private actors and customary institutions. This panel examines how power, institutions and competing forms of knowledge shape access to, control over and responses to Africa’s fluid commons. Bringing together empirical and theoretically informed perspectives, it explores the tensions between conservation and livelihoods, formal and customary governance, environmental change and community resilience, and state authority and local resource institutions. Particular attention is given to how political and institutional processes produce inclusion, exclusion, enclosure and contestation around wetlands, rivers and other aquatic commons. By bringing African cases into conversation, the panel seeks to advance a more politically grounded understanding of commons governance and to examine pathways towards more equitable and resilient environmental governance.

A central concern within commons research is understanding how institutions, governance systems and collective action evolve to support sustainable resource use. Small scale fisheries (SSF) in the Asia Pacific support food security, livelihoods, and community wellbeing. They also provide rich examples of complex commons systems where resource users, state agencies and other actors interact across multiple scales of governance. While research programs increasingly seek to address the challenges these fisheries commons face through participatory and applied approaches (i.e. by collaborating with fisher groups, communities, government agencies and/or other stakeholders), a practical gap often persists; namely how fisheries management and governance research findings can be translated into meaningful and lasting change? This panel session brings together research practitioners involved in research-in-development projects working on tropical SSF across the Asia-Pacific. Participants will present perspectives and experiences from the field in designing, testing and implementing innovations in diverse social, ecological and institutional settings. In doing so, discussions will centre on better integration of these perspectives into broader debates around how local research partnerships can achieve impact.

The panel session has three interconnected objectives: to showcase research on fisheries governance and management innovations; to clarify pathways for impact from that research; and to strengthen an Asia-Pacific community of research practitioners working on tropical SSF management. This session is organized in the context of projects from across the Asia Pacific that are supported by the Australian Centre for International Agriculture Research (ACIAR).

Coastal commons are increasingly shaped by the interaction of climate risk, ecosystem change, livelihood dependence, and emerging blue carbon agendas. Yet these processes are rarely governed in isolation. Climate extremes alter ecological suitability and resource availability; blue carbon policies redefine the value and use of coastal ecosystems; and communities must continuously adapt their livelihoods within shifting environmental, economic, and regulatory conditions. This panel brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on how coastal commons can be understood and governed under such uncertainty. Contributions will explore climate and environmental modelling, spatial suitability assessment, coastal livelihoods, ecosystem vulnerability, blue carbon conservation, and regulatory frameworks across marine, coastal, and island systems. Particular attention is given to the question of how scientific assessments of risk and suitability translate into decisions about conservation, restoration, aquaculture, resource access, and community development. The panel also asks whether areas identified as environmentally or economically “suitable” are necessarily socially legitimate or equitable. By connecting modelling with lived experience, local knowledge, governance, and policy, the session moves beyond viewing coastal systems as fixed spaces. Instead, it approaches them as fluid socio-ecological commons in which climate, ecosystems, people, institutions, and competing claims continuously interact. Together, the papers seek pathways toward more adaptive, equitable, and evidence-informed governance of rapidly changing coastal futures.

Transboundary rivers are among the most consequential yet poorly governed fluid commons: over 60% of the world's rivers cross political boundaries, agreement on and implementation of transboundary river governance remains challenging. This panel examines these challenges amid climate challenges and increasing environments of nationalism, taking the case of the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GMB) basin. The India-Bangladesh Ganges Water Sharing Treaty – which defines transboundary water governance in the GMB basin expires in December 2026. Ongoing discussions on the renewal of the Treaty remain limited to volumetric sharing of water, not necessarily recognizing the dynamic nature of this fluid commons that sustains lives, livelihoods, fish migratory routes between the two countries, shaping sediment transportation, soil fertility, floodplain connectivity and groundwater recharge. Globally, transboundary rivers are governed through administrative, jurisdictional treaties that do not acknowledge the connectivity of vital ecological waterscapes. In the GMB basin, inadequate transboundary river governance has resulted in ecological distress, increased salinity in deltaic regions and increasing freshwater insecurity. Comparing GBM governance with global case studies, this panel will discuss what needs to change urgently, especially considering climate triggers and impacts on millions of water-resources dependent, marginalized communities living in this deltaic region. Our session argues that transboundary rivers are not water pipes - to administratively control, store, divert, or allocate, but living and emergent systems local communities live amongst, rely on, systems that nurture fauna and flora and the foundational basis for resilient, inclusive climate adaptation.

Around the world, rights to the sea are changing rapidly. Might it be influenced by the blue economy strategies of governments, or new production possibilities. All such changes are happening in a fluid material realm that is characterised by many interdependencies and relational realities which suggest they are particularly suitable to be governed by common property regimes.

However, one gets the impression that the dominating processes of property we observe are leading to more exclusive rights, including de facto privatization and a concentration of property. The growing literature on blue grabbing and the emergence of blue justice and equity concerns seem to indicate a process of decommonisation in which access to marine resources is becoming increasingly exclusive and unequal. In the marine realm, these processes are importantly not confined to a single location: property transformations at one scale or locality are often being shaped by distant markets, actors, institutions, and ecological processes, creating complex global interdependencies.

These dynamics make it valuable to analyse these processes from a commons perspective, for better understanding processes of decommonisation and commonisation of the sea and the coasts. Particularly, commonsiation seems to be much needed, as the sea will remain to a large extent a shared resource.

This session invites people who are thinking about those processes of property anywhere on the globe. Examples might relate to conservation efforts, to the use of AI in the field of fisheries monitoring, evolving global property regimes in the high seas, new production forms, tourism or many more. Presenters to this session are invited to submit their papers to an ongoing collection in Maritime Studies about the same topic.

Climate change and rapid urbanization have supercharged the challenges of governing coastal areas and small islands. Such amphibious places are under pressure from the landward side as urbanization drives infrastructure projects that infill and enclose coastal waters, and from the seaward side as blue development seeks to extract ever more marine resources. Meanwhile, climate change is intensifying storm surges and coastal flooding even as it stresses coastal and marine ecosystems, like coral reefs, that offer natural protection to human and more-than-human communities.

These challenges are especially acute in the archipelagoes of maritime Southeast Asia. Accordingly, governments have responded in various ways and at multiple scales. In this panel, we review and critique governance approaches to coastal areas and small islands in Indonesia and the Philippines. Starting at the microscale, Weena Gera rethinks blue economy governance in the small yet rapidly urbanizing islands of Nasingin and Banacon, located near the Danajon Bank in Bohol, Philippines. Scaling up slightly, Laurice Jamero examines the interjurisdictional challenges of preserving the Danajon Bank despite a warming climate. At a national scale, Ryan Tans documents geographic and temporal patterns in the incidence of land reclamation projects in Indonesia. Working comparatively, Paolo Valenzuela explicates the paradox of building disaster resilience through coastal infrastructure in Indonesia and the Philippines. At a global scale, finally, Jan Navales engages the development financing industry by tracing trends in blue economy-targeted financing. Taken together, these papers document and critique the continuing expansion of urban infrastructure and economic extraction across Southeast Asia’s coastal waters.

Indonesia has witnessed the degradation of marine ecosystems and the vulnerability of small-scale fishers' livelihoods in recent decades. For example, 52% of the 11 National Fisheries Management Areas have been "fully exploited" and subject to overfishing, and 33.82% of coral reefs are now degraded. Meanwhile, macroeconomic trends show a decline in the standard of living of fishers, with 63% of fishing households living below the national poverty line and trapped in debt. This condition is a consequence and result of the commodification of the fisheries sector, massive global extraction through modernized fishing and processing methods. However, there is still limited studies and research in eastern small islands of the Archipelago, mainly that demonstrates how the marine space, as a fluid commons, is slowly transforming into a space of accumulation, control, and contestation among various actors. This panel seeks to center the voices, initiatives, and lived experiences of the commoners in the small islands of eastern Indonesia and their organizations. This panels aims at presenting some studies that brings together NGOs - based researchers and community-based organizations from Tanakeke islands (South Sulawesi), Kaledupa island (Southeast Sulawesi) and Numfor (Papua) to document and reflect their own experiences. In so doing, the panel seeks to offer a critical understanding of how fluid commons become an arena of contestation between large-scale fishers who can accumulate profits, state control through fisheries regulations and conservation policies, and struggles for livelihoods amidst expanding commercial activities and ecosystem destruction in coastal areas and small islands.

New ocean technologies and infrastructures are increasingly being tested and deployed across coastal and marine environments worldwide. These introduce new objects into the ocean ecology while also transforming existing relations across multiple scales. At the same time, the development of these technologies depends on rendering complex coastal environments knowable and governable through particular forms of data. Decisions about what and how knowledge is produced, whose knowledge counts, and who benefits from that knowledge become central to the political ecology of ocean technologies. Yet, existing research has shown that the development of ocean technologies and its top-down knowledge production generated uneven socioecological consequences (Hung 2020; Lu 2020). Coastal areas are often among those most immediately affected by changes in ecosystems and patterns of resource use. The infrastructure through which ocean technologies are designed, operated, monitored, and rendered knowable remains largely controlled by governments, private developers, universities, and other expert institutions. This creates a mismatch between the scales at which technological and epistemic authority are concentrated and the scale at which their socio-ecological consequences are experienced. Arguably, this discrepancy exacerbates longstanding gendered, racialized, and class inequalities within coastal areas. How do new ocean technologies reshape the ways we know, represent, and govern the ocean? What kinds of data and knowledge are produced? What is made meaningful and actionable during these processes? Finally, under what conditions might this knowledge contribute to the commoning of the ocean rather than creating new forms of enclosure or inequality?

Small-scale fishing communities around the world have developed institutions for collective action to govern access to and extraction of marine resources. Yet coastal commons are rapidly changing. Conservation initiatives, aquaculture, ecosystem restoration, climate adaptation, pollution, and emerging blue-economy activities increasingly require fishing organizations to coordinate collective action beyond the harvesting activities around which many of their institutions were originally built.

This panel asks what happens when institutions developed for collective resource extraction are called upon to address new collective-action problems. Bringing together empirical studies of small-scale fishing communities across different social-ecological contexts in Latin America, the papers examine how existing organizations and governance arrangements are extended, repurposed, or transformed to pursue new productive, environmental, and stewardship functions.

Across cases, the panel explores whether capacities developed through long-term collective resource management, such as trust, monitoring, rule-making, leadership, territorial organization, and relationships with external actors, facilitate collective action in new domains, and what new challenges emerge when the objectives, actors, spatial scales, and distributions of costs and benefits change.

By shifting attention from the emergence of collective action to its expansion and transformation, the panel seeks to advance understanding of how established commons institutions adapt as coastal communities confront increasingly diverse demands on fluid commons.

Fisheries are a classic commons, yet contemporary area-based marine conservation often shifts decisions over access and use away from resource users (the fishers themselves). As global commitments such as 30×30 accelerate the expansion of area-based conservation, there is growing interest in governance arrangements that include fishers in decision-making and could accommodate both conservation and fishing. Temporary fisheries closures offer one promising avenue. These closures expire, periodically open to harvest, rotate through space and time, or combine these features.

Drawing on three years of comparative research in Mexico and French Polynesia with modeling, the TEMPO project asks whether temporality itself can create opportunities for commoning: the creation or strengthening of institutions through which communities collectively govern resources. Our research has identified three potential pathways. First, periodic harvests can transform an otherwise individualized activity into a collective one: across cases, 30–100% of catches from short harvesting events are shared within communities. Second, repeated decisions about when, where, and how closures operate create recurring opportunities to renegotiate rules and participation, sometimes bringing previously marginalized fishers into governance. Third, because temporary closures require actors to repeatedly sustain, or withdraw, their cooperation, they depend on continuing collective action rather than a one-time agreement. In some cases, these processes spill over into stronger commons institutions beyond the closure itself. This panel brings together several lines of evidence from TEMPO as a backdrop for a discussion with the audience about marine commons and pathways to commonization.

Urban commons are critical sites through which communities respond to pressures arising from urbanisation, environmental change, infrastructural transformation, and shifting state-non-state relations. Yet the institutions that govern commons rarely emerge through formal design or policy alone. More often, commons governance is assembled through institutional bricolage, whereby communities, civil society actors, and public authorities adapt, reinterpret, and combine formal rules, informal norms, customary practices, and organisational arrangements to sustain collective action. This is especially visible in frontier and informal settlements where customary practices, informal tenure, and intermittent state presence combine into distinctive, improvised governance arrangements.

The panel explores how institutional bricolage shapes urban commons as they emerge, adapt, and change over time. It asks how relationships among states, civil society organisations, and communities shape the capacity of commons institutions to respond to social and ecological change while sustaining participation, accountability, and inclusion.

We invite contributions exploring how commons are maintained, contested, or transformed through interactions among multiple actors and institutional forms, with attention to power, representation, multiple and sometimes competing institutional logics, and the conditions under which bricolage strengthens democratic governance or reproduces exclusion.

The panel welcomes empirical and comparative contributions on urban commons including housing, water, energy and public space, with particular interest in kampung commoning and other Global South contexts of rapid urban transformation – but also open to presentations from other contexts, including the Global North.

Nature-based solutions (NbS) are increasingly promoted to address urban heat, flooding, biodiversity loss and declining well-being. Yet they are commonly treated as technical infrastructure and evaluated by ecological performance or economic value, with limited attention to who controls, accesses and benefits from them. Consequently, NbS may create shared ecological benefits while reinforcing exclusion, privatisation, green gentrification and unequal decision-making.

This panel views NbS as urban commons created and sustained through collective stewardship, learning and negotiation. The critical question is therefore, under which ecological, institutional and political conditions do NbS function as equitable and enduring commons rather than commodified green amenities?

Responding to four major gaps in the literature, i.e. the dominance of eco-technocratic approaches, weak integration of equity, limited longitudinal evidence and the underrepresentation of G

Lobal South cities, we invite conceptual, empirical, comparative and creative contributions addressing:

• community rights, access and stewardship across the NbS lifecycle;

• alignment among ecological functions, local knowledge and institutions;

• procedural, distributive and recognition justice;

• tensions between grassroots and state- or market-led NbS;

• polycentric governance, digital participation and adaptive learning; and

• longitudinal evaluation of ecological and social outcomes.

Bringing together diverse disciplines and urban contexts, it will develop a “commoning lens” for assessing what NbS deliver, who shapes them, who benefits and whether those benefits endure. This perspective can reposition urban nature from a planned intervention to a collectively governed foundation for just and resilient cities.

Rurbanity describes a condition, an attribute, and a result of on-going rural-urban transformation processes that are characterized by rurality and urbanity at the same time. Being highly location-specific, ambiguous, and dynamic, it provides breeding grounds for experimentation and self-organization, involving the continuous reconfiguration of material flows, social practices, systems of meaning, and spatial structures. As such, rurbanity is not an intermediate stage or transitional phenomenon, but a structural feature of contemporary global urbanization with its own ontology. While some of its features resonate well with the idea of “kampung”, the role of urban (or rural) commons in rurbanity has not yet been specifically reflected. The proposed roundtable discussion will address this gap by asking: How do kampung and rurbanity resemble or relate to each other? When, where, and how do rurban transformations promote or threaten / destroy or create (which) common goods? What are the social and ecological consequences? What does that tell us about the impact of the commons (and of rurbanity) for sustainability? Beyond kampung commoning, our discussion will touch on the potential of comparative analyses of different regions in the Global South, and on the need for interdisciplinary collaboration in grasping the multi-dimensional nature of (resilience, resistance, and collective action in )social-ecological research.

In an increasingly interconnected world, sustainability outcomes are shaped by interactions that unfold across time and space. Urban sustainability challenges, in particular, cannot be understood by examining cities in isolation from the rural and peri-urban landscapes that surround or provision them. Cities and their urban frontiers are intimately bound through flows of resources, labor, information, and finance that stretch across geographic and institutional scales. These interdependencies generate both synergies and tradeoffs, while reshaping how communities access, govern, and sustain shared ecological resources.

This panel invites contributions that examine urban-rural relations through telecoupling and teleconnection frameworks, with attention to how distant socioeconomic and environmental interactions shape social-ecological systems and practices of commoning within them. We are especially interested in work that moves beyond conventional understandings of scale and place to explore how sustainability strategies in one location may produce consequences elsewhere, and how these effects feed back into local systems. The panel asks: When do adaptive strategies for managing shared resources become maladaptive, and for whom?

We welcome temporally and/or spatially sensitive empirical, comparative, theoretical, and methodological contributions that investigate these dynamics across the rural-urban continuum from around the world. Potential themes include water and food systems, migration and labor, land and housing, and infrastructural interdependencies. Together, the panel will advance a relational understanding of sustainability that recognizes cities and their surrounding landscapes as interconnected systems rather than as isolated sites of intervention.

This panel features papers that analyze urbanization across the global to understand how social changes and ecological changes interacts overtime at multiple layers of global social ecological system. The panel examines both historical and contemporary dimensions of how rural out-migration across the globe shapes the evolution of urban commons. How does rural out-migration since the industrial revolution shape livelihoods of individuals and groups (village, city, and region for example)? What are the consequences to human behaviors on life-style choices, consumption, innovation, and freedom? How does urbanization alter ecological systems such as land, forest, water, air, and habitats for diversity of species? If global urbanization process introduces distinct sets of human behaviors and rules over time that are fundamentally different from pre-industrial societies, then human values, cultures, norms, and foundation of rules under urban systems deserve careful analysis to understand the making of urbanocene.

Informal settlements — the chengzhongcun, kampung, basti or favela — house much of the urban population under insecure tenure. What is informal is the residents' hold on housing and land, not the shared space itself, which ranges from municipal streets, statutory parks and rivers to courtyards, alleys and rooftops made by residents. Designated or not, all of it is used in common, and access to all of it is contested. This panel asks who actually shares that space, on what terms, and with what consequences for justice. Provision is only the beginning: a settlement may sit beside a park it cannot enter, or keep a lane carrying more collective life than any facility the city has built for it. Inside, access is mediated by tenure, gender, age, ethnicity, occupation and landlord–tenant relations, so the same courtyard is commons for some and a boundary for others. From outside, demolition, resettlement, upgrading and amenity-led greening reorganise shared space in ways that rarely leave existing users better off.

We invite empirical, comparative, methodological and creative contributions on: -how shared space is claimed, allocated, maintained, defended and given up, and by whom; - exclusion within settlements, including tenants, migrants, women, children and informal workers; -the reach of municipal services, planning law and property regimes, and their absence; -what demolition, resettlement, upgrading and gentrification do to shared space; -methods for making undercounted commons legible — ethnography, oral history, participatory mapping, arts-based work; -comparative work across Asia, Africa and Latin America. Together, the panel shifts public space justice from provision toward access, governance, recognition, and the durability of the commons residents already hold.

Urban commons, commoning practices, and associated institutional arrangements have important roles in enabling climate adaptation and sustainable just transitions. There are calls for cities to invest time and money in strengthening their commons and associated institutional arrangements to better address the effects of climate change. At the same time there is significant diversity, heterogeneity and inequity within and between urban collectives. We need a better understanding of how such diversity and inequity can enable or impede the adaptive capacity of different groups of people in responding to climate change induced extreme weather events.

The impacts of extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, or heatwaves, are differentially and intersectionally experienced by different groups of people. For instance, women, groups with members from marginalized caste, ethnic and race backgrounds, and other vulnerable urban residents are much more likely to feel the negative impacts of climate change - either because of household caregiving roles or because their access to urban commons that can potentially mitigate climate shocks might be curtailed or restricted across factors such as time of day, ability, or age. This panel therefore seeks contributions that explore the question of how urban commons might differentially enable or impede the adaptive capacity of different groups of people experiencing extreme weather events, and the role of heterogeneity, inequity and diversity between and within urban and peri-urban communities in influencing adaptive capacity. The panel seeks studies across plural lenses including but not limited to historical, theoretical and/or methodological innovation across diverse geographies, commons, commoning practices and lived experiences.

Crises are often understood as moments of disruption in which established systems of governance and everyday life temporarily break down. Yet they also create openings for new forms of collective action. This panel explores how urban commons emerge, transform, and become institutionalised in response to disasters, war, climate disruptions, and mega-events. Often, these practices take explicitly insurgent forms, including occupation, protest, or counter-archiving. Neither simply a temporary response to crisis, or a stable form of community self-management, we see commoning as a verb, a dynamic process through which different actors negotiate access, resources, and forms of collective stewardship.

Bringing together cases across different urban contexts—Indonesia, Cyprus, Japan, Western Sydney and Brisbane—the panel examines commoning in various socio-economic and political contexts in the Pacific region. In all these cases, established arrangements are challenged and new forms of collaboration and material enactment became possible. Disasters expose weaknesses in existing institutions while simultaneously generating new solidarities and forms of mutual aid. Climate change demands experimentation with radically new ways of managing resources and adapting urban environments. Mega-events produce both displacement and citizens mobilizations for collective infrastructural claims.

Rather than searching for universally transferable “best practices,” we ask what situated forms of knowledge can be extracted and networked from various moments of crisis and translated into usable lessons for present and future challenges. This is increasingly urgent as climate change, geopolitical instability, and economic insecurity generate an overlapping and accelerating polycrisis.

Also to clarify, we have structure this and the other proposal we have also submitted (From Autonomy to Institutionalization: Negotiating the Urban Commons) in sequence and conjunction with each other to address different aspects of urban commons and to establish a dialogue among the thematics of emergence, crisis, autonomy and institutionalization of the urban commons.

Urban commons are often imagined as autonomous spaces of self-organisation that exist outside formal institutions. Yet in practice, their survival often depends on ongoing negotiation with municipalities, states, landowners, and various institutions. This panel explores the shifting relationship between autonomy and institutionalisation, asking how commons maintain collective agency while seeking resources, legitimacy, and recognition.

Rather than treating autonomy and institutionalisation as opposing states, we understand them as poles between which commons fluctuate. Institutional recognition can provide access to land, funding and legal protection, but may also introduce new forms of dependency and control. Maintaining autonomy can protect collective decision-making but may limit resources and stability.

Cases across Brazil, Greece, Italy, Japan and Denmark examine how these tensions unfold in different urban and socio-economic contexts. How do commons negotiate with powerful institutional actors? What forms of institutionalisation do not compromise communal decision-making? And how do commons evolve when the conditions that initially mobilized them change?

Particular attention is given to professional and knowledge-based actors—planners, designers, lawyers, and researchers—as mediators between situated practices and formal institutions. The panel asks how different forms of knowledge and agency encounter one another, and whether these encounters enable mutual transformation or domesticate professional expertise. ​Approach​ing commons as ongoing processes of negotiation with different forms of institutionalisation, we seek to understand which arrangements allow urban commons to remain​ self-governed while engaging with wider systems of governance and collective life.

Municipal solid waste governance involves more than the management of discarded materials. It determines how responsibilities, environmental costs, service failures, and benefits are distributed across households, communities, governments, firms, workers, and territories. These allocation problems become particularly visible in fragmented urban systems, where multiple public, private, informal, and community actors participate in collection, recycling, transport, disposal, monitoring, and enforcement.

This panel examines waste governance as a problem of governing shared burdens under institutional fragmentation. It asks how different institutional arrangements shape who provides services, who bears the costs when systems fail, who is accountable for environmental harms, and how actors respond when responsibilities overlap or remain unclear. Contributions may examine municipal solid waste collection, informal recycling, concession and contracting systems, landfill governance, illegal dumping, public-private arrangements, environmental justice, or collective responses to gaps in service provision.

Bringing waste governance into conversation with commons scholarship allows the panel to examine collective action around responsibilities and environmental burdens alongside the more familiar governance of shared resources. The panel seeks to identify how institutional design, incentives, accountability, and fragmentation shape the distribution and governance of waste-related burdens across urban systems.

This panel comprises four papers on disrupted food commons in Korea, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, and Singapore. Aligning with the conference theme, they foreground the resilience of collective action. The Korean case examines disruptions in commons formation in rural Youth Village Projects where young farmers assemble shared land, assets, knowledge, and social relations. It reframes the commons as a food landscape, integrating food production and community stewardship to address spatio-cultural challenges. The Taiwan case study explores how infrastructure constitutes, sustains, and disrupts hydro-social commons while producing unequal water relations in Puli, a prominent "water town”. It investigates how local farmers depend on interconnected water infrastructure, ecological processes, and community practices threatened by a proposed industrial waste landfill. In land-scarce Singapore, urban food commons face frequent disruptions from tenure expirations. This study examines how two citizen-led initiatives navigate displacement to rebuild their commons. The first is a two-decade-old food and environmental community that seeks to rejuvenate its practices in a new location. The second, an urban agriculture initiative, left without a physical space, pivots to helping others establish edible gardens. Finally, comparing Nanning (China) and Bandung (Indonesia), the study introduces authorization regimes as a lens to analyze how rules, relationships, and resources govern how collective actors secure space, legitimacy, and support. Moving beyond the binary of state control versus grassroots autonomy, it shows how commoning operates through public agencies, intermediaries, and landholders. Together, these papers contribute to the theories and praxes of resilience in disrupted commons.

Creole pig breeds represent more than animal genetic resources: they embody generations of adaptation to local ecosystems, traditional knowledge, cultural heritage, and rural livelihoods. However, their conservation cannot depend solely on genetic characterization or institutional programs. Their future requires viable production and market systems capable of generating value for farmers while protecting animals, ecosystems, and communities.

This panel explores the relationship between creole pig production, agroecology, and the Economy for the Common Good as an alternative framework for rethinking livestock systems. Rather than maximizing productivity per animal, this perspective considers broader values such as biodiversity conservation, animal welfare, healthy soils, local feed resources, fair working conditions, short supply chains, and equitable relationships between producers and consumers. Creole pigs can play a strategic role in diversified agroecological systems through their capacity to use locally available resources, recycle nutrients, interact with vegetation and soils, and adapt to environments where highly specialized breeds may require greater external inputs. Yet these systems will only remain viable if consumers recognize their environmental, social, cultural, and nutritional value. The discussion proposes moving from a production-centered model toward territorial food economies in which farmers, consumers, researchers, chefs, institutions, and local markets share responsibility for conserving livestock biodiversity. Protecting creole pigs therefore means not only preserving genetic diversity, but also building an economy in which producing food regenerates ecosystems, strengthens rural communities, respects animal life, and contributes to the common good.

Indonesia’s food system has long been anchored in a productivist paradigm, where the official food policy and development program have been largely focused on only a few food crops, characterized by a corporate-driven and state-centric mechanism. Despite impressive increases in food production, it has left a scar of environmental degradation, high food dependency on industrialized, import, and global food market, exclusion of local communities, shrinking democratic civic spaces, and food vulnerability to particularly marginalized groups.

The country’s current food governance – understood as a system of rules and decisions that determine how food is produced, distributed, and consumed – has obviously contributed to a reproduction of the status quo of food development narrative and mechanism.

This panel aims to contribute to the discussion around food as commons by fostering alternative ways of re-valuing food as not merely a commodity. This panel will bring together actors from civil society, academia, government, and practitioners world with each their specific experience and perspectives in discussing contemporary food governance practices, examining food commoning from the ground and potential pathways for food systems transformation, and re-formulating strategies for strengthening the commoning of food in Indonesian rural-urban-coastal context and beyond.

Archipelagic Indonesia offers an interesting ground for scholarly and practical exchanges as it is home to examples of food narratives underlying food commons which value food not merely as commodity nor only for their value-transfer modality. These narratives showcase food transition processes which have been engendered by a continuous dialogue between state-led food governance and civic and community collective action.

For rural communities, the role of Commons in food and nutrition is often overlooked. Food from Commons, such as mushrooms, tubers, leafy vegetables, wild fruits, fish, and meat and milk from Commons-dependent livestock systems, form an integral part of local diets, and contribute to food security and dietary diversity, strengthen resilience during food scarcity and climate variability, and carry deep cultural significance.

Community governance, guided by collective wisdom, is at the core of these food systems. It ensures that food and nutrition are treated as Commons and governed by practices mindful of everyone’s needs. Women, as seed keepers, knowledge holders, cultivators and collectors, shape what is conserved, grown, harvested, consumed and exchanged. Their knowledge of native foods, seasons and seeds is critical to dietary diversity and nutrition.

Yet these local foods are often looked down upon as “poor man’s food” and not accorded the same social status or value as cultivated grains and fruits or are commoditised, undermining local food systems and community practices that sustain them.

The panel brings together experiences and learnings that highlight the role of communities, especially women, in conserving and managing common resources, enhancing native biodiversity including seeds and genetic diversity, improving food and nutritional security, and strengthening cultural identity and inter-generational stewardship.

Highlighting linkages between Food as Commons and Commons for Food, this panel will include examples of community-led food Commons governance, which is critical for ensuring food and nutritional security and improving resilience and self-sufficiency of commons-dependent communities.

Throughout the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, survival has relied on ecological knowledge and cooperation in governing shared resources. Building on this foundation, TEK supports the collective management of water, forests, fisheries, and agricultural landscapes through customary institutions, cultural values and intergenerational practices, enabling communities to interpret ecological change, regulate access, monitor resources and coordinate action. However, these place-based systems increasingly face pressures from climate change, markets, migration, technology and state intervention.

This panel examines TEK as a dynamic institutional system whose effectiveness emerges from the alignment of ecological conditions, cultural knowledge, community relationships and broader governance arrangements. Moving beyond romanticised accounts of traditional knowledge, it welcomes comparative, longitudinal and place-based studies examinin G how TEK interacts with formal law, scientific knowledge, markets and polycentric governance.

Contributions may address: • TEK in rulemaking, monitoring and collective decision-making; • resilience under global change; • power, gender, generation and equity; • integration of TEK with science and formal governance; • customary tenure and legal pluralism; and • scaling of TEK without eroding cultural integrity and ethics. Bringing together diverse regions, ecosystems and disciplines, the panel will identify the conditions under which TEK supports effective, equitable and culturally legitimate commons governance. It will also explore how place-based institutions can inform global biodiversity, climate adaptation and sustainability policies while respecting community rights, knowledge sovereignty and contextual diversity.

Across movements, scholarly traditions, and sites of struggle, the frameworks of solidarity economy and commons offer alternatives and responses to extractive capitalism, colonial modernity, and technocratic solutions to planetary crisis. Provisionally, the commons may be understood as the shared use of places, knowledges, resources, and relationships broadly accessible to a community and sustained through widely distributed practices of care. Solidarity economy often refers to economic practices organised through cooperative decision making, democratic inclusion, and forms of production, exchange, and consumption oriented toward the wellbeing of people and planet rather than profit. Both terms stand in opposition to dominant conceptions of capitalism as self-interested activity aimed at private accumulation within competitive markets. In this sense, they point toward economic, social, and ecological imaginaries grounded in interdependence, shared responsibility, and collective flourishing.

This panel builds from an upcoming special issue in the International Journal of the Commons that examines the relationship between commons and solidarity economy by attending to their variant origins, histories, and political trajectories, while also pursuing the work of thinking them together. How might the commons extend our understanding of solidarity economy and with whom, or with what, we are in solidarity? Conversely, how might the solidarity economy clarify the ethical and political terms under which spaces, places, and ways of knowing and doing are held in common? The value of thinking these concepts and practices together lies in the possibility of articulating forms of politics grounded in particular conditions yet capable of connecting across places and scales.

This panel centers Indigenous women leaders from Indonesia and Thailand who defend communal land, cultural heritage, and livelihoods against extractive industries that damage their ecosystems. The session foregrounds commoning as decolonial practice: collective, place-based, and rooted in ancestral governance, spirituality, and women’s knowledge. Mardiana D. Daren (Ma’anyan, Indonesia) presents the universe of Ume and the cyclical “gilir balik” farming system as a living commoning strategy. Aleta Baun (Mollo, Indonesia) shows how Indigenous ritual becomes a weapon of resistance, mobilizing communities to protect sacred landscapes from mining and dispossession. Noraeri Thungmueangthong (Pga K’nyau, Thailand) discusses green economy practices in the Indigenous Women’s Forest in her village of Ban Huay E Kang. Naree Puttaraksakun (Pga K’nyau, Thailand) examines Indigenous women’s knowledge in natural resource management and health. Together, the panel challenges dominant commons frameworks by centering decolonization, gender, and Indigenous ontologies. The session encourages attendees to consider how commons scholarship and practice can better support the ongoing struggles of these Indigenous women.

Indigenous landscapes are often understood through separate development lenses such as nutrition, education, livelihoods, climate, governance and culture. communities, however, experience these realities as interconnected. rayagada challenge lab, RCL emerging from work in Odisha, India, asks whether diagnosis itself can become a collective act. RCL, brings together community knowledge, practitioner experience and research to explore complex challenges before solutions are designed. Its first phase is anchored in six diagnostic inquiries examining interconnected dimensions of Indigenous landscapes. Rather than presenting these as completed findings, the panel will bring together diverse perspectives to question, connect and interpret what emerges across them.

The panel will explore three central questions: who defines the challenge? What becomes visible when different forms of knowledge are brought together? And how can collective diagnosis lead to locally owned experimentation rather than another externally designed programme?

Panelists will reflect on the tensions between expert knowledge and lived experience, between different ways of understanding a landscape, and between the need to identify shared patterns and the importance of preserving local difference. The conversation will also examine what it takes to create spaces where communities are active participants in defining questions, interpreting evidence and shaping pathways forward. RCL is deliberately presented as an evolving practice rather than a completed model. The panel invites practitioners, researchers and community actors to consider whether diagnosis can become a form of collective knowledge building and whether such processes can strengthen community ownership of questions and actions.

This panel aims to remind ourselves what is unsettling about indigeneity as an idea. We are concerned that a monolithic interpretation of indigenous discourses in the academia and in ecological practices often overlooked the idea’s political implications. An essentialist discourse on indigeneity could romanticize the epistemic extraction of indigenous knowledge as Western alternatives (Graeber 2015), lead to a timeless understanding of indigenous ontology (Zodd 2016), and be vulnerable to politicized co-optation of indigenous political statements (Bhan and Govindrajan 2023). That said, our critique does not undermine the struggles of indigenous communities. We instead argue that destabilizing the conceptual monolith of indigeneity as a method helps clarify the historical complexity and ongoing racial dynamics within Southeast Asian contexts and draws attention to historically marginalised (more-than) humans as political subjects.

In Southeast Asia, indigeneity emerges "as a situated practice shaped by colonial legacies, postcolonial state formations, and global rights discourses" (Laugrand and Barnes 2026). Grounded in the cases of the Borneo and Sulawesi, this panel provides a reaccount of both the becoming and iterations of political indigeneity. We seek to bring scholars together for delineating the colonial legacy behind the narratives of native-nature intimacy, recognizing indigenous people as political subjects, and soliciting more accountable and conscious discourses on the archipelago’s margins.

This panel centres Indigenous and pastoralist practices of commoning as living, relational ontologies that challenge extractive, colonial logics of resource governance. Drawing on ethnographic research from high-mountain, arid, and coastal communities across the Global South and North, we examine how customary commons sustain socio-ecological reciprocity through mobility, seasonal use-rights, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Contributors will explore tensions between neoliberal enclosures, climate change, and intergenerational erosion of commons, while highlighting acts of resistance, revitalisation, and epistemic justice.

The panel invites decolonial perspectives that foreground Indigenous sovereignty, land-based pedagogies, and pluriversal futures beyond state-centric conservation and marketised environmentalism.

In a reflection by the philosopher Achille Mbembe (2021, p. 214) on the cultural history of Africa, this could not even be regarded outside the paradigms of roaming, mobility, and displacements. In-depth analyses of development, either seen as economic growth or as human advancement, point to mobility and displacements, with a postmodernist lens and contextualized to new South-South cooperation, as causes and outcomes of the will to decolonize, officially expressed in Bandung in 1955. Following these paradigms, the study of decolonization, linked and delinked from that of indigenization, shall take into account the different types of mobilities herein proposed: a) social mobility, intended as migration and the set of social, economic, and environmental outcomes of it; b) geographical mobility, as the set of results of human cooperation for the preservation of nature and culture as commons, as well as the advancement of communities based on Bandung principles; and, thirdly, c) mobility as decolonization, the rise and indigenization of Southern epistemologies, to allow the Global South to participate actively in the designing and achievement of goals for the fair use of commons. The history of displacements, which have actually changed human geographies and reflected the colonial infrastructure of mapping the world, either with physical, psychological, or relational frontiers, is entrenched with that of the use of commons and the need for a pragmatic decolonization of it, in a collaborative South-South manner, negotiated in the denomination and functions of indigenization.

Contemporary scholarship should therefore give special attention to the different types of mobilities that had an impact on the ways commons were used, the way people from different communities were allowed.

In Indonesian discourse, ‘adat’ has been the most familiar term associated with indigeneity. While decolonial efforts and commons advocacy align in resisting capitalist intrusions, deep tensions arise from the “harmonious myth” that tends to romanticise adat communities and indigenous spaces as inherently classless and commons-practicing. The imaginary of adat can obscure the practices of local elites as their traditional authority is used to accumulate surplus and mobilise labour, thereby transforming collective commons into sites of private accumulation. Nevertheless, the role of indigeneity in the formation and deepening of capitalist relations remains contingent. Despite (if not by virtue of) indigeneity emerging out of a dynamic and dialectical process that interacts with capitalist relations, ‘adat’ can be a powerful tool in commoning struggles in the face of privatisation or dispossession by the state or capital. Existing adat institutions which regulate land as commons can be upheld and revitalised. In communities without such existing institutions, adat can also be a powerful creative discourse to rally people in the effort to create new commons relations. As an imaginary based on cultural differences turn into normative ideological references in the name of strategic essentialism, how can indigeneity tread the line between a reification that is oblivious to internal class exploitation and an assimilation that means surrendering to the pressures of capital? Gathering empirical cases of struggles within agrarian transition, customary forest co-optation, and resource concessions in Indonesia, we intend to explore the possibilities, constraints, and alternatives for an indigenous decolonial struggle that is fiercely critical of internal class exploitation.

The rise of Indigenous politics and growing networks for decolonization have brought renewed attention to Indigenous ethical frameworks, ontologies, epistemologies, and practices as alternatives to dominant colonial understandings of the commons. Globally, Indigenous peoples and communities are asserting authority over territories and knowledges while engaging, negotiating, transforming, or refusing relationships with states and other formal institutions. Yet these encounters raise fundamental questions about recognition, knowledge, governance, and autonomy. Formal recognition may create new possibilities for Indigenous political authority while also translating Indigenous worlds and practices into institutional categories. Similarly, the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge into research and governance may create opportunities for transformation while risking extraction, appropriation, or depoliticization. These tensions invite us to reconsider whether decolonization should be understood primarily through institutional inclusion and recognition, or also through Indigenous autonomy, refusal, and the creation of alternative spaces of governance and knowledge production.

The panel also turns attention to methodology. How do we understand Indigenous commons, decolonization, and pluriversality without reproducing the ontologic and epistemic relations that these approaches seek to challenge? Rather than treating specific methods as inherently decolonial, we are interested in how research methodologies are situated and practiced; and how these methodologies shape authority, representation, interpretation, and relationships between people, communities, and researchers.

The key themes are: Recognition and autonomy; Knowledge and Methodology and Pluriversal politics.

Across the world, growing social, ecological, and economic crises are prompting renewed interest in forms of collective organization that place cooperation, reciprocity, and shared environmental stewardship at the center of economic life. Research on both the commons and the solidarity economy has expanded rapidly over the past two decades, yet these evolving conversations are often in parallel rather than in dialogue. Solidarity economy scholarship foregrounds democratic ownership of resources, mutual aid, and economic alternatives, while commons scholarship has focused on institutions for collective action, commoning practices, and collaborative natural resource governance. Underpinning both traditions is the desire to understand how societies might reorganize societies beyond the exclusive logics of market and state; however, what remains underexplored is the compelling relationship between solidarity, economy, and the commons. We welcome theoretical, empirical, historical, and practice-based contributions that explore the intersections between commons, commoning, solidarity economy, diverse economies, and other forms of collective economic organization. We are particularly interested in contributions that bridge scholarship and practice, engage with experiences from the Global South and North, and reflect on the transformative potential—and limitations—of solidarity-based economic arrangements. By bringing together scholars and practitioners from different disciplines and contexts, the session seeks to advance a broader research agenda for IASC that places the solidarity–economy nexus at the heart of contemporary debates on collective action, institutional innovation, and socio-ecological transformation.

Commons scholarship has illuminated institutional design and collective action, yet it often treats communities and households as coherent units, obscuring inequalities and everyday politics within them. This panel brings feminist political ecology into conversation with critical commons scholarship. It understands commons not as fixed resources but as living socio-political processes produced through gendered relations of labour, care, knowledge, authority and collective action. To examine the commons, we propose a framework of four dimensions: res communis, the shared resource; rex communis, the state, customary authorities and institutions claiming the right to govern it; praxis communis, the everyday practices through which people sustain and contest the commons; and lex communis, the rules, norms and social relations connecting resources, authorities and practices. Gender relations are not an external variable but constitutive of who is recognised as a commoner, whose knowledge counts, who performs productive and reproductive labour, and who exercises authority or receives benefits.

The panel invites papers that focus on gender and explore this framework across various commons. Contributions may address gendered and intersectional inequalities in communal rights and their legal recognition, protection or contestation; how authority and everyday commoning practices reproduce or challenge gender relations; and how women build alliances, resist enclosure, and reshape the commons. The panel seeks to identify collective actions that can redistribute authority, resources, and labour, and when gendered commoning promotes socio-ecological resilience and transformative justice. The papers will compare how gendered power shapes, regulates, and alters the commons.

Forests and forest lands in the global South are often claimed as a global commons: to provide climate and biodiversity benefits to the world; for global food production; for its below-ground critical minerals to fuel renewable energy systems and technological advances. After decades of struggle, local forest stewards have made progress in claiming their customary rights, often in opposition to the (colonial) state and the selected interests of powerful private actors. Global forest governance has also supported advancements in the recognition of rights, inclusive participation in decision making processes and efforts to safeguard the humans and non-humans in contested spaces. More recently though, we observe what is called in the literature a “democratic backsliding”: where tenure is only relevant as it provides security for investors; where social and environmental safeguards are diluted to not place undue burden on business-as-usual private sector; where public institutions are mobilized to protect private extractive interests; where incentives favor the individual entrepreneur over the collective; and where civil liberties are restricted and activism is delegitimized as un-national, il-legal and anti-development. Democratic backsliding is growing across the world and in global institutions. We argue that we urgently need to advance understanding of institutional, legal and civil functions and strategic actions within democratic backsliding in the forested commons at global and local levels, to then explore together how to break this pattern. The panel aims to bring together academics, practitioners and activists to contribute to the Democracy theme, while also engaging with the themes on tenure, climate change and indigeneity and decolonization in the commons.

New forms of institutional arrangements have emerged over the past few decades to govern the commons in the contexts of rural transformation. While building on historical legacies such as property regimes and constitutions, these forms have become increasingly nested across scales and sectors to complement the management efforts by local communities that are largely shrinking and aging. Accordingly, the state-commons relationships have been changing, wherein multiple actors have come to be involved in sustaining or revitalizing the rural commons in the era of triple planetary crisis and global marketization.

This panel explores how nested governance has been evolving in the recent decades and to what extent it has facilitated rural revitalization and nature conservation. The panel revisits the long-proposed concept of nested enterprises for successfully governing the commons (Ostrom 1990) and contextualizes it in the current effort of rural revitalization and conservation. We invite contributions of empirical case studies, theoretical discussions, or methodological development to address the above-mentioned overarching questions. Specific questions to be addressed may include, but not limited to: - How have the values and interests in the commons changed in the contexts of rural transformation? - What has driven the changes in the institutional arrangements for rural revitalization and conservation? - How have the institutional arrangements changed over time and how have they become nested to govern the commons? - How do different types of nested governance affect local communities around the commons, and how different institutions complement each other? - What challenges and opportunities have arisen through the evolving processes?

Effective governance of the commons often requires state, civil society, and communities to work together in some form. This has given rise to a range of arrangements often referred to as “multistakeholder platforms” (MSPs) (also called multistakeholder processes, forums, or multi-actor platforms). But simply bringing these divergent actors together does not necessarily lead to inclusive, or even effective, governance processes. This panel will discuss the experiences and challenges of MSPs in managing some form of commons, including water, forests, pastures, wildlife, or biodiversity, as well as landscape-level coordination. Papers may include empirical studies and reviews, each highlighting lessons with broader applicability. The panel would particularly be enriched by studies that allow comparisons across bottom-up MSPs and ‘invited spaces’. Discussion will address how the context, actors, and processes affect outcomes and what researchers and practitioners can do to support more effective and equitable MSPs. The panel is organized by CGIAR, but other submissions are welcome.

Key questions to be addressed include:

What are common challenges in practice, and what strategies have been effective in overcoming them?

How are power relations considered (or not) in the organization of MSPs, and how does this affect processes and outcomes?

What are the fundamental differences between bottom-up spaces and “invited spaces” and what lessons can be learned from each for “success”?

Discussants: Anne Larson, Everisto Mapedza, Krister Andersson, Ruth Meinzen-Dick

Politics are the ways in which people organize themselves in society. As these organizations manage resources, power, and control, studies of politics often examine government, regulations, and policies. Popularly, politics are often immediately associated with state government and processes to gain positions of power. However, the notion of politics includes many levels of governing as an act of organizing society, including in the scale of everyday life. Furthermore, embedded in politics is the objective of organizing, which is in general to work towards a good life that society envisions. This envisioning requires exchanges of ideas through which members of society brings multiple perspectives to discuss and debate and chart ways of organizing towards that vision. Brought together by the need to refocus politics to the everyday life, this panel brings together paper presentations on “vernacular politics” of Indonesia. Indonesia’s political changes in the past thirty years have been characterized in scholarly discussions by national-level political changes and the rising political-economic roles of cities through decentralization. We argue that it is important to understand politics in everyday spaces, since nation- and city-scale politics require grounding in the daily life of the people. Covering a range of aspects in vernacular politics, including mundane activities, women’s public role in community, youths’ everyday challenges, solidarity-building, and spatial realities in small urban spaces, we identify the missing link of political reform is the focus on vernacular politics. We position vernacular politics as the foundation of society’s political life, through which people build organizational capacity through everyday encounters, action, negotiation, and conflicts.

When the earth shook off the coast of Flores, Indonesia, on 15 August 2026, and when flash floods tore through the Nepal-Tibet border eleven days later, decisions about who was warned, who was rescued, and who received relief were made almost entirely by men. Women were counted among the dead, the displaced, and the caregivers who rebuilt what was lost, but they were rarely counted among the district authorities, disaster management bodies, or relief command structures that decided how the response unfolded. This is not incidental. It is the direct consequence of a data gap: without gender-disaggregated evidence on who is exposed, who is displaced, who carries the care work, and who already leads at the community level, disaster and climate governance systems have no basis on which to place women at the tables where decisions are made. This panel treats that gap as a governance problem for the commons. Forests, water, land, and the institutions that manage disaster risk are commons that communities hold and defend together, and decisions about them fail when half the population is missing from the evidence base and from the room. The panel brings together geospatial science, artificial intelligence and data governance, grounded case studies from South Asia and Indonesia, and the lived experience of women who have built careers, led institutions, and organised collectively, to ask one shared question: what would it take to move women from counted-as-affected to counted-as-deciding? The panel is convened by Prof. Seema Mehra Parihar, geographer and founding member of ELVA Women, together with two ELVA Women colleagues and others who will make the conversation meaningful.

This proposal is offered as a cross-thematic session linking Theme 6 with Themes 7 and 9.

“Warga jaga warga” (“people protect people”) has become a well-known slogan among Indonesians as they lose trust in the government and turn to one another to share resources and critical information when the country experiences democratic backsliding, man-made disasters, and widening economic gap. In the past five years, at least, the slogan has been manifested in various practices of commoning which are the focus of this panel. This panel analyses the knowledge commoning and digital commoning practices of informal networks, activists, micro governance, and grassroots organizations. It pays particular attention to gendered, classed, and generational differences, and also place-based practices including the sharing of historical archives and the resharing of resources that are critical for the survival of the people during times of crises, from the COVID pandemic to today with heightened repression and control over civil societies.

The panel aims to understand and identify the tactics of the commoning practices that have emerged and practiced by women, young people, local communities, as well as the precarious and continuous labors pinned by the regime and crises. Inspired by Budianta’s (2019) view of commoning as a cultural practice that is not fixed nor given, but rather "rediscovered and readjusted in a fluid and an open manner”, we read how the commoning tactics pivot upon ideas of fluidity in creating collective survival within (and often, in an interplay with) the capitalist and institutionalist structures. As we analyse these tactics as efforts of “people protect people”, we identify how each tactic speaks to the biopolitical relations and suppression enacted by the regime. Keywords: commoning tactics, civic society, knowledge commoning, Indonesia

A commons is not simply a resource shared by a community. It is a social and institutional arrangement through which people, usually as a community, collectively govern something for collective benefit. However, the community governing a commons never operates in isolation. Its rules, decisions and practices are embedded in—and potentially constrained or enabled by—a wider institutional environment: laws, government policies, markets, corporations, donors, researchers, neighboring communities and other levels of governance. These institutions itself are not homogenous entities and result in a complex system of rules and regulations operating differently at different levels, in other words a system of institutional layering and legal plurality

The panel gathers different perspectives on conflicting or overlapping hierarchically systems of rules and regulations which influence the decision making for the governing of the commons. How much freedom do communities or organizations have in governing their commons andto establish their own rules and regulations? At the same time, how and by whom is the freedom of the communities regulated? Who balances the protection of ‘local common interests’ against the priorities at a higher level of societal interest? Talks by stakeholders who handle the stakes at different policy/management levels will higlight the legal/institutional architecture surrounding commons; cases of conflict where solutions are hampered by differences of perspectives among levels within a hierarchy, A case of conflict owners' association(VVE): governing the commons from within; and the perspectives of research on multi-stakeholder processes.

In recent decades, the nickel, pulp and palm oil industries have turned areas in Halmahera, Tano Batak and Papua into sacrificed zones: stripped and extracted to supply commodities for the development of other. This was achieved by creating "fully controlled territories" for flexible natural resource extraction. This process of total territorialization relied on centralized spatial planning, concession policies, and state violence. It also depended on the development of a compliant citizenry, achieved through the dismantling of customary institutions, the implementation of technical interventions, and the incorporation of citizen labor into extractive industries. This process of depoliticization began long before the arrival of extractive industries.

This panel seeks to examine how total territorialization was achieved in Halmahera, Papua, and Tano Batak. This includes exploring: (a) changes in property relations and in human-nature relationships; (b) changes in modes of production and reproduction, including changes in consumption, ways of knowing, and culture; and (c) changes in institutional structures related to the management of shared resources. The panel discussion will also explore the intergenerational trauma these changes have inflicted on society, manifested as apathy and a loss of self-governance.

However, there are always critical voices and citizens who refuse to be subdued. This panel will therefore explore how resistance and resilience among ordinary people are expressed, in the form of everyday actions aimed at 'surviving in the face of adversity.' This includes how ordinary people organize resources, utilize remaining common spaces, including open democratic spaces, and how they develop democratic practices to meet basic needs.

Commons governance in India faces a coordination problem: rights are recognised (FRA, PESA), schemes funded (MGNREGA, GPDP, CAMPA, SRLMs), and forest-produce markets exist, but each runs on its own logic, geography, and timescale. This roundtable takes area-based planning—organising decisions around a defined socio-ecological landscape—as a provocation, asking whether it can align these flows around community priorities. Anchored in Odisha, where Common Ground works with government on PESA operationalisation, forest-produce markets, and tribal development planning, and drawing on parallel work in Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, the session opens three lines of discussion. First, the resource envelope: can financing be assembled as a stack—layering MGNREGA, GPDP, Article 275(1), CSS convergence with CSR and blended capital—so community-validated plans, not fund silos, drive allocation? What does it take for institutions to steward, not merely receive, such capital? Second, livelihoods through NTFP and bamboo value chains—drawing on the bamboo enterprise model in Odisha (Bamboo Village Trust, SPREAD) and women-led NTFP collectives—asking how area-based planning can reposition tribal women as producers, not conduits for value. Third, technology for commons governance: the Block Resource Centre and Knowledge Commons as infrastructure linking price discovery, planning, and entitlement access at landscape scale, asking what it takes for such tools to serve local institutions. The roundtable convenes practitioners, government, financiers, and researchers from South and Southeast Asia to interrogate landscape-scale coordination, surfacing tensions between finance, governance, and community control.

The Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IADF) is a powerful tool to unpack how institutions function and potentially enable sustainable collective action across diverse resource systems. Despite its utility, current interpretations and case study applications of the framework tend to under-theorise hidden power dynamics involving actor groups within and across action situations. The IASC-ECN Power Collective has been engaging with various theoretical approaches, ranging from positivist to critical, to unpack various forms of power within the IADF. Our recently published article in The International Journal of the Commons (https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.5334/ijc.1595) provides a glossary of questions relating to power, drawing on different theoretical approaches, mapped onto different components of the IADF. This glossary represents an initial step towards developing a diagnostic tool that enables institutional analysts to uncover subtle or invisible nuances of power within their case studies. A natural extension of this work would be to examine current definitions of IADF components and in how far their framing allows analysts to ask power-related questions within their own cases.

This panel therefore seeks to convene scholars with an interest in power dynamics using the IADF and those combining critical theory and institutional analysis in other ways to explore the limits of these definitions and where they might impede politically nuanced institutional analyses. How could IADF definitions be expanded or re-interpretated to accommodate power questions from critical epistemologies? We welcome submissions across the breadth of formal and informal institutional settings from social-ecological resource systems to knowledge commons and other systems.

This panel focuses on the governance of natural resources in the SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa), discussing farming and pastoral practices related to local ecological knowledge, as well as property regimes often associated with the communal ownership of water, pasture, land and forests by local communities in North Africa and the Middle East. We will also examine how these property regimes are linked to the identity and ontology of local peoples, embedded in Islam, as well as the notion of the environment based on pre-Islamic faiths. We will thus explore also the relationship between Islamic thought and local environmental perceptions in the SWANA region, bridging historical frameworks and contemporary realities. Key themes include the ontological status of nature, the human role, and the ethical obligations toward the natural world.

Finally, we will discuss the issue of land and commons grabbing by states, conservation agencies, and external investors, as well as forms of local responses. Building on these foundations we explore how these classical and contemporary perspectives shape local environmental understandings in Islamicate societies and how they continue to inform contemporary thought and practice in light of climate change, commercialization and authoritarian politics.

The panel is based on two courses offered by both chairs at the University of Bern. Key case studies included Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Israel/Palestine and Turkey.

Resistance movements to development-induced land and water dispossessions across the Global South are becoming common. Why do these movements emerge? What are the terms of resistance? How is resistance sustained, deferred or lost? (Chandra and Taghioff 2015). Spanning diverse contexts across Asia, and drawing on empirical fieldwork, these papers critically foreground the ‘commons’ to understand people’s resistances to, and demands for development, while illuminating the amorphous boundary between legality-illegality. The cases we bring into conversation are as follows: Drawing on a case in northern India, Yaduka argues that ecologically vulnerable communities develop socially recognised, though often legally unauthorised, claims to temporarily use both private and public land which bring forth claims are grounded not in formal ownership but in moral ideas of necessity, reciprocity, collective survival. In different contexts in India, Singh, Das Gupta and Shree, by contrast, are revealing how resistance movements fundamentally reshape the material terms of the commons. Specifically, Singh’s analysis of the 2020–21 farmers’ movement and post-movement resistance examines how the farmers' organisations strike to build larger unity while dealing with competitive agrarian activism. And, Shree’s paper traces the journey of the Ganga Mukti Andolan, which gathered support from different sections of society and was successful in abolition of Panidari tax prevalent. From the perspective of fishers in Thailand and Cambodia, Fink, Beban and Flaim draw on Blaser and de la Cadeña’s (2017) concept of the uncommons to reveal how atrophied concepts of the fishing “commons” that often undergird both development and resistance movements. Paper on Sri Lanka answer similar questions in fishery.

Research on networks of action situations (NAS) has moved institutional analysis beyond isolated decision settings. Drawing on foundational and subsequent contributions to the NAS literature, it shows how action situations are linked through institutions, information, actors, and biophysical or operational flows, and how configurations of interdependent situations jointly shape governance outcomes. This panel takes that research program as its starting point.

The panel examines how political processes operate within and across NAS. It asks how institutional configurations shape problem definition, the selection and perceived feasibility of alternatives, political support, authority, coalitions, and entrepreneurship; how an output generated in one situation alters these dynamics in adjacent situations; and why collective-action commitments persist, adapt, stall, or unravel across a governance network. Papers may draw on policy-process theories, political economy, policy feedback, implementation research, or related approaches to examine these dynamics in conversation with NAS.

The panel welcomes conceptual, comparative, and case-based contributions on sequential, nested, overlapping, or cross-level action situations in waste, water, forests, fisheries, climate governance, urban services, and other commons domains, especially from the Global South. Together, the papers assess how political-process explanations can complement established NAS tools for identifying situations, characterizing their links, and analysing configurations. The goal is to clarify the mechanisms through which institutional networks shape policy and collective-action trajectories over time.

Liberal democracy has legitimised capitalism. The structural incapacity of capitalism is the primary reason for the failure of democracy, which is unable to address people's needs. To counter this flaw, we may have to create another economy rooted in democratic values. Commons have emerged as an alternative economic paradigm in the last few decades, supported by information technology. The emerging commons (technology, knowledge, capital, culture, and natural resources) disrupt capitalism to some extent, as they favour decentralisation over control. For the commons to develop, institutional reforms are essential. Recently, we have witnessed Commons-based peer production, enabled by the internet and free software, which has the potential to sustain a more democratic and just society. This panel seeks to answer how emerging commons can sustain a democratic society amid a crisis.

Commons scholarship rarely asks who pays for resistance. This panel takes up that question through the Credit Union (CU) movement in North Sumatra, Indonesia, where some 500 village savings groups — built wholly from members' own savings, governed by rules members craft and enforce themselves, and in places woven into Batak adat — constitute a finance commons, not a financial service.

Our shared argument is that commons beget commons. Because a CU is member-owned and answerable to no outside financier, its treasury can be deliberately allocated to defend older commons: logistics for mobilisations against PT Toba Pulp Lestari's pulpwood concession, PT Gruti's logging and PT Dairi Prima Mineral's zinc mine; participatory mapping and community valuation of threatened springs and forests; and the household liquidity that lets families refuse company compensation, wage labour and moneylenders through years of conflict. Autonomous finance is the material infrastructure of reclaiming forest and customary territory.

The obverse follows: enclosure now targets that infrastructure. Presidential Instruction 9/2025 plants 80,000 state-funded cooperatives in the same villages, threatening CUs less through market competition than through regulatory co-optation, elite capture and fiscal hostage-taking of village budgets — an assault on the right to self-organise, and on the civic space that autonomous finance underwrites.

Five papers—four by CU accompanying organisations in Deli Serdang, Karo, Toba and Dairi, one comparative analysis from PSP3, IPB University—test this argument across contrasting landscapes, asking when a finance commons sustains, and when it forfeits, the collective action it funds. Cross-thematic with Themes 1, 5 and 8.

Linking evolutionary pathways in grassroots adaptation of the past with our present and future adaptation strategies, this panel puts the role of the commons as key foundations for systemic resilience. Putting the politics of knowledge (re)production central, it shows how climate adaptation is closely interlinked with grassroots resistance and agency shaping. We view knowledge as plural and positions the world’s different knowledge systems as key building blocks for adaptation. It investigates how knowledge (re)production processes are rooted in and derived from symbiotic relations (or the lack thereof) between the different types and forms of knowledge, local institutional rules, arrangements, and practices, and the power dynamics that shape it. These different knowledge systems include different ways of knowing, embedded in lived experience, memories, and the arts, entangled in multiple overlapping governing networks. We position grassroots communities both as foremost impacted groups by climate change and as front runners in adaptation responses, with Southeast Asia as a key site to adaptation strategies. What actors and institutions play an important role in processes of knowledge reproduction? Why and how do power relations and competing interests matter in shaping local communities’ decisions, and their multiple evolutionary pathways? How do these pathways and relations reveal institutional and socio-political orderings as they are shaped by internal dynamics and external influences, including how they are embedded in ceremonies, rituals, and folklore?

This is a cross thematic panel, with connection to: Fluid territoriality and more than human geographies: Reconceptualizing the marine commons of sea nomads panel under Conference Theme 2).

Climate change discourse tends to organise itself around crisis: a logic of rupture that calls for urgent intervention, adaptation, and resilience. In this discourse, "commons" usually denotes shared natural resources or global public goods under threat. This panel asks what happens when both of these framings are opened up rather than taken as given.

We invite papers that think of commons as something communities make and remake — relationally, socially, and epistemically — in the course of living with environmental precarity, rather than as a fixed resource to be protected. We're also interested in what happens when communities don't recognise themselves in the crisis-and-recovery framing that dominates climate policy and advocacy.

We welcome papers loosely organised around four questions, though not limited to them: what people do in the face of environmental precarity (practices of commoning — solidarity, mutual aid, belief, memory); how they narrate time (alternative framings of crisis, colonial history, cyclical or generational temporalities); how they position themselves against dominant frames of climate action (endurance and refusal as critical stances, not deficit or denial); and how we, as scholars, think about all of this (conceptual and methodological reflection on resilience, commoning, and the risk of flattening these responses into romanticised resistance).

This panel is conceived as a space for comparative conversation across different climate-vulnerable contexts and disciplinary approaches. We're especially keen to hear from work in progress and from papers that complicate or push back against the framing offered here.

Climate change is reshaping how commons are governed, but so too are the responses to it. The renewable energy transition, and its escalating demand for critical minerals, is opening a new extractive frontier across forests, coasts, and customary lands. Anchored by a study of nickel mining in Central Halmahera, Indonesia, this panel examines how such climate responses reconfigure commons institutions, access, and authority, and why it matters: the transition risks dispossessing the very communities it claims to protect. It asks when transition and resilience strategies foster just collective action, and when they instead produce green grabbing, enclosure, and dispossession.

The panel advances a single argument: that the low-carbon transition is moving shared and customary resources "from commons to commodities." As a National Strategic Project central to global nickel supply, Halmahera exposes the machinery of this shift. A hierarchical institutional structure, the Basic Agrarian Law (5/1960) and Presidential Regulation 3/2016, reclassifies unregistered customary land as state property. A near-total Chinese export market drives corporate expansion. And local governance is hollowed out, as elite capture and manipulated compensation recast village heads as corporate intermediaries rather than community representatives. Read through a critical-institutional lens, these dynamics show how "green" demand drives commons enclosure beneath the banner of climate policy.

Further papers are invited on conservation, restoration, and renewable-energy frontiers elsewhere, and on the reforms, common-pool resource governance, decentralised regulation, and recognition of customary rights, through which communities contest dispossession and craft just resilience.

The Social-Ecological Systems (SES) framework offers a powerful diagnostic lens for analyzing interactions among ecological systems, institutions, and resource users, though scholars note the need to capture ecological complexity better. An equally important challenge is how commons are rendered visible or invisible through governance, policy, and knowledge practices.

Commons are not self-evident; they are recognized, mapped, and governed through institutional and epistemic arrangements that shape what counts as commons, whose knowledge is acknowledged, and what pathways of resilience become possible. Globally, commons are often rendered invisible through land classifications, sectoral policies, and technocratic planning, obscuring institutional diversity and local capacities sustaining resilience.

This panel argues that resilience is not only a property of social-ecological systems but also a consequence of what governance systems are able to see. It examines visibility and invisibility across contexts including forests, water bodies, rangelands, coastal systems, urban commons, and Indigenous territories. We welcome contributions on how commons are represented, how communities challenge dominant framings, and how alternative knowledge can strengthen resilience.

Guiding questions include how commons are recognized and represented; what remains invisible in dominant frameworks; how classifications shape governability; and how communities challenge invisibilisation.

Fit with Theme 7: Climate resilience is shaped not only by environmental change but by how systems are recognized within governance. Invisibilisation often excludes institutions and collective action central to adaptive capacity, informing the panel's discussion of resilience and transformation.

Societies around the world are increasingly experiencing the impacts of climate change. While more frequent and severe weather events and related natural disasters are creating an uncertain future, much more needs to be done across all levels of society and governance to effectively respond to and adapt to climate change. People’s quality of life worldwide will increasingly depend on the capacity of individuals, communities, and institutions to respond to these changes, adapt to their impacts, and prepare for future events.

This panel will explore what local communities can do to adapt to climate change, which capacities and conditions enable them to act, and why some communities are more successful than others. Particular attention will be given to community-based environmental action, local knowledge, the governance of common-pool resources, organisational capacities, and relationships between communities and public institutions.

We invite researchers and practitioners to present examples of community responses to climate change challenges, such as heatwaves, droughts, floods, and other climate-related pressures.

We are interested in both traditional and new community responses, in rural as well as urban areas. By bringing together experiences from diverse communities and contexts, the panel aims to identify and discuss the conditions and practices that strengthen communities’ capacities to mitigate climate-related impacts, adapt to climate change, and build long-term resilience.

Climate change disrupts shared landscapes and, with them, the institutional arrangements that sustain commons. As disasters intensify, habitats shift and established rules for access, collective labor, funding, and stewardship may no longer hold. Communities and institutions must then renegotiate the terms of collective care, sometimes reorganizing governance from below, sometimes navigating new funding and policy regimes from above.

This remaking compounds with specific landscapes and infrastructures whose material properties, ecological rhythms, and political-economic histories constrain what kinds of governance are possible. A coastal ecosystem may need decades to mature while funding regimes demand project completion within years. Pest regimes may shift faster than collective management can reorganize. The durability of commons governance depends as much on these spatial and temporal conditions as on institutional design or collective will.

This panel asks how commons governance is remade across climate-disrupted landscapes, from urban coastal infrastructure and disaster-recovery programs to rural agricultural commons under ecological stress. Bringing together cases across regions and political-economic contexts, it asks what enables commons to reconstitute after disruption, and what forecloses durable commoning. The panel is particularly interested in the interplay between institutional remaking and the material, spatio-temporal, and political conditions of the landscapes through which commoning takes shape.

Collective repositories of shared rules, norms, and institutional memory are vital for building resilience in social-ecological systems (SES) facing rising planetary threats. As risks intensify, communities, institutions, and networks revisit traditional practices and incorporate scientific knowledge to advance collective knowledge, experiment with rules and innovative practices, to navigate uncertainty. The panel aims to strengthen the SES knowledge and approaches across sectors, geographies and timelines to better understand governance for resilience amidst the rising crises and risks. The objective is to cumulate the diverse SES case studies useful to organize knowledge at local, regional, and global scales, supporting resilience in complex and shifting contexts. The expected outcome is to reflect upon the intrinsic interconnectedness of SESs, examine the relationships between climate impacts and governance for resilience, and catalyze the shared knowledge to benefit local-global community for better preparedness from crises and risks. The panel invites paper and oral presentations on diverse SES including forests, fisheries, water, indigenous knowledge, infrastructure, and more. The SES case studies may range from in-depth single-case study to comparative or meta-analytical approaches. Contributions, preferably adopting the SES framework (but not limited to), will be cumulated to analyze how SES case studies functions across different scales, settings, and challenges; how cocreating and co-learning are fostered; how shared knowledge improve collective governance; how collective governance enhance understanding of resilience building; and how researchers and practitioners mobilize collective action to document and disseminate SES knowledge during increasing crises.

Polycentric governance is recommended for its capacity to adapt, learn, and self-organize across scales. But the social-ecological systems that polycentric arrangements govern are rarely stable. They are subject to political and economic upheaval, accelerating climate change and its cascading effects, demographic and land-use change, and the rapid diffusion of new technologies into monitoring, decision-making, and resource allocation. We know comparatively little about how polycentric arrangements themselves change in response to these pressures, or about what allows some arrangements to adapt, absorb, or reorganize successfully while others become brittle, gridlocked, or captured. This panel invites papers that trace how polycentric governance arrangements evolve over time in response to disruption. We welcome contributions addressing any driver of change, political, economic, climatic, technological, or social, in any sector or at any scale, and using diverse methods, including historical and longitudinal case studies, comparative analysis, institutional or network analysis, and modeling. We are particularly interested in papers that move beyond describing polycentric arrangements at a single point in time to examine trajectories: how authority, rules, and relationships among governance units shift, consolidate, fragment, or reconfigure as conditions change, and what explains these different trajectories. Taken together, the papers will speak to a shared question: what makes polycentric governance resilient, able to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, or transform in response to disruption, and what instead leaves it fragile or maladaptive?

Climate change is reshaping the governance of the commons across the Asia Pacific, straining collective action, customary rules, and the property regimes through which forests, fisheries, coastal systems, and water resources have long been managed. Human-environmental relations are diverse and dynamic, evolving over generations into distinct configurations that underpin customary rules and collective action, as scholars call “biocultural diversity.” Whether communities cope, adapt, or transform depends not only on biophysical conditions but also on whose knowledge is counted as legitimate and how knowledge is legitimised for governing commons resources. With the rise of logical positivism and modern science as the basis of evidence in climate and disaster research, there has been a growing tendency to dismiss alternative knowledges, experiences, and relationships to the environment and climate. Modern science offers a strong evidence base, yet it flattens the layered understandings held by different societies and peoples. That flattening is not neutral. Diminishing the complex, plural human–environment and climate relations that shape the governance of the commons itself acts as a mechanism of enclosure, “green grabbing,” and maladaptation. When climate and disaster responses rest on narrow technical framings, they can override customary access, reconfigure authority, and dispossess collective mechanisms and the people whose relations sustain the commons. Drawing on scholarship across the Asia-Pacific, this panel examines the values, risks, and opportunities of centring plural human-environment relations in climate and disaster response. We ask under what conditions resilience strategies foster just and sustainable collective action.

We live in a crisis-ridden world. Community-governed resources (forests, irrigation tanks, fisheries) are continually buffeted by climate-induced and co-occurring cascading crises (ecological disasters, economic shocks, social stresses). Communities face a complex challenge: If collective human action has brought them here, how can human agency be deployed to navigate them towards a just and sustainable future?

This question needs to be investigated from multiple angles. To list a few:

a) How do communities perceive such crises? How do such perceptions influence the governance of collectively managed resources? For instance, are communities able to untangle the effects of climate change from those of associated disasters?

b) Is there a need to re-envision existing infrastructure for tackling cascading crises? For instance, can farmers' markets (Indian Haats), serve as spaces to co-create effective governance strategies for community resources amid economic shocks and social stresses?

c) How can marginalised communities buffeted by crises be empowered to act as stewards of collectively managed resources? For instance, how effective in building resilience to crises are pooled savings of women-led savings groups despite threats of elite capture?

d) Can community-owned knowledge connect the past to the future? For instance, how can communities reliant on resources that are threatened by enclosure or green grabbing (such as pastures) leverage past exposure to crises for adapting to future crises?

This panel invites submissions from scholars and practitioners who use a range of methods (qualitative, quantitative, participatory, mixed) and research approaches (positivist, post-positivist, interpretive, critical) to dig deeper into into the whys and hows of such puzzles.

Strongly anchored in local communities, small-scale fisheries (SSF) reflect a way of life, and they provide critical contributions to nutrition, food security, poverty alleviation, livelihoods, and local / national economies. Yet, their multiple benefits and contributions are often overlooked as many SSF communities remain economically and politically marginalised, are highly vulnerable to climate, environmental, as well as to markets and regulatory changes, and remain invisible in policy debates. Nonetheless, the survivability and continuity of many small-scale fisheries suggest certain strengths and forms of resilience. A holistic understanding of what causes vulnerability and what makes small-scale-fisheries viable is required. This panel will focus on vulnerability and transitions to viability in small-scale fisheries as a commons process. It aims to unravel the many dynamics inherent in how the two are connected and what responses are possible within a collective action framework for building strong and resilient small-scale fisheries communities. Drawing key elements from the commons theory, a series of contributed papers will use Vulnerability To Viability (V2V) Transitions as a novel approach and conceptual framing to highlight their interconnected nature and offer conceptual and policy directions on the potential for vulnerable small-scale fisheries commons to transition toward viability.

Agroecology in Southeast Asia finds its practical expression in agroforestry systems that integrate trees with crops and livestock. Present on up to 70% of Southeast Asian farms, forms of agroforestry remain crucial to rural livelihoods in upland and island environments, including in areas undergoing rapid agrarian-forest transformations and areas zoned by state agencies as national forestry estate. Although agroforestry seems more resilient than intensive farming, ongoing agrarian change processes and climate variability threaten its viability.

This panel invites case studies from Southeast Asia that interrogate the current agroecological turn in development policy. Papers can:

•⁠ ⁠investigate how rural communities navigate the challenges of climate precarity as they strive to create sustainable agroecological futures; •

⁠ ⁠explore the diverse forms of agroecology and their potential to evolve from fragmented projects into an interconnected network of sustainable practices;

•⁠ ⁠consider efforts to scale agroecological transitions with a focus on the diversification of ecosystem services and on women’s contributions to sustainable farming;

•⁠ ⁠explore the potential for adaptive agroecological pathways;

•⁠ ⁠examine the processes that shape livelihoods, climate precarity, and social reproduction to understand the processes determining agroecological pathways among small-scale, resource-poor and vulnerable communities;

•⁠ ⁠keep in sight the processes influencing agroecological pathways to understand how these practices may contribute to social well-being and mitigate the challenges of an unstable climate;

•⁠ ⁠Examine how access to and control over common‑pool resources is negotiated, contested, and distributed, and how this affects agroecological outcomes.

Mega-deltas in Asia, including the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna, Mekong, Indus, and Irrawaddy-embody a striking paradox: most fertile and food-productive regions, yet have historically concentrated immense poverty. Today, these deltas stand at the forefront of climate vulnerability. The geography that makes deltas fertile-low elevations, dynamic water flows, and sediment deposition also makes them exceptionally fragile in the Anthropocene. Taking the case of Bangladesh, this panel brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss why addressing the delta paradox requires moving towards justice-centered water governance. Decades of hard-infrastructure "fixes" and agrifood intensified have increased agricultural production and improved food security, but have also dammed, diverted, and obstructed natural floodplain pathways in the coastal region. Once abundant distributaries are slowly disappearing, intensifying water conflicts and risky agricultural landscape-a “desert in the deltas”. This session explores how freshwater crises, top-down policies, and elite resource capture have contributed to enclosures of distributaries-depriving smallholders and marginalized households especially women of irrigation and domestic water, in addition to triggering severe soil salinization, fallow fields, and socioeconomic inequality. The panel will detail countermobilizations and NGO-partnered canal reclamation initiatives that have sporadically restored collective management, community access, and climate resilience. Policy incoherence on water commons serve to enable power asymmetries, institutional fragmentation, and elite-state collusion. The way forward requires repoliticizing of this landscape and enabling arrangements that do not favor elite extraction over local subsistence.

Climate change and socio-economic uncertainty are transforming the conditions under which commons are governed. Yet in many contexts, including post-socialist Central Asia, these changes unfold within strongly state-centred institutional environments. Changing resource availability, markets, property regimes, and environmental policies may be imposed from above, while local actors develop strategies to negotiate, reinterpret, or adapt to them. This panel asks how commons persist and transform under such conditions of asymmetrical institutional change. Drawing on comparative research on grasslands, pastoralism, and resource governance in Central Asia and Africa the panel examines institutional flexibility as a potential basis of commons resilience. We explore how local norms, social networks, property arrangements, cultural values, and ecological knowledge are maintained, reworked, or abandoned as communities respond to changing ecological and political-economic conditions. Rather than assuming that adaptation is necessarily bottom-up, we ask who has the power to define the terms of institutional change. When do local strategies enable continued collective access to resources, and when are they constrained by state policies, markets, conservation interventions, or new property regimes? When does institutional adaptation strengthen commons governance, and when can it facilitate enclosure, exclusion, or appropriation? We argue that the resilience of commons depends not simply on their ability to withstand disturbance, but on the scope actors have to negotiate and reshape institutions under conditions of unequal power. Adaptation is therefore both a practical strategy and a political process through which access, authority, and the value of common resources are contested.

How do you build institutions for moving commons when resources cross sovereign boundaries but jurisdictions do not? Taking the U.S.–Mexico border as a case study, this panel examines how transboundary governance frameworks fall short under climate stress, environmental injustice, and intense economic integration. The region’s water governance illustrates these systemic limits. Governed by a 1944 Treaty designed for volumetric deliveries rather than shared stewardship, the system faces severe strain from extraordinary drought, widening gaps between past treaties and current hydrological projections, competing hydro-regional interests, and eroding trust between water users and bilateral institutions. The institutional gap is even starker for air. Border communities share unified airsheds burdened by industrial emissions, dust, and port-of-entry traffic. Yet while water possesses a treaty and an international commission, air governance relies on a nonbinding framework and fragmented monitoring regimes that fail to provide a shared account of what residents breathe. As nearshoring-driven industrialization further stresses these airsheds, this panel examines emerging community-led atmospheric monitoring, data validation politics, and the limits of state-centric management. Panelists argue that borderland environments are currently governed by boundary-enforcing entities rather than true commons institutions, proposing instead to rebuild governance outward from the resources and the communities relying on them. Addressing Themes 8 (Institution Crafting under Pressure), 7 (Climate Stress and Resilience) for the water case, and 12 (Emerging Approaches); the panel highlights air as the commons least equipped with institutions and least visible in commons research.

Energy systems are undergoing rapid infrastructural change as renewable generation, storage, mini- and microgrids, smart and prepaid metering, demand flexibility, automation, and other distributed technologies expand in response to decarbonization, resilience, and energy-access goals. They are often evaluated for reliability, affordability, and expanded electricity provision. Yet they may also alter, reshape, or transform energy governance, raising questions about who performs key functions, who participates in decision-making, where information and authority lie, and whether institutional arrangements for oversight, accountability, and adaptation keep pace or change more slowly. As climate-oriented technologies become embedded in physical and digital infrastructure, questions arise about how they interact with institutions and collective governance capacity. This panel invites work examining when emerging energy infrastructures strengthen, complement, transform, bypass, challenge, or displace existing governance arrangements. Particular attention is given to contexts where technical and institutional change unfold together, including changing energy systems across the Global South. Contributions may examine new forms of collective organization; changes in roles and decision-making authority among communities, governments and public agencies, utilities, markets, and intermediaries; mismatches between the pace of infrastructural and institutional change; or exclusion, contestation, and weakened local authority. We welcome theoretical and empirical work and encourage participation by practitioners and early-career scholars. Through this session, we hope to strengthen connections among IASC attendees working on energy commons, energy transitions and energy governance.

Rangelands constitute one of the largest commons on Earth and are central to the livelihoods of pastoralist communities across the globe. Pastoralism supports millions of people and represents a major rural livelihood system, while rangelands are increasingly recognised for their contributions to biodiversity conservation, climate-change mitigation and future food security. Yet, persistent perceptions of rangelands as “empty” or “wastelands” have made them prime sites for land appropriation, first for developmental projects and protected areas, and increasingly for renewable energy and green-transition initiatives.

These processes of land grabbing are not simply material transfers of land and resources; they are sustained through what we propose the 'politics of legitimacy' that determine whose claims, knowledge and forms of land use are recognised. While global narratives of development, conservation and climate action shape these processes, their legitimacy is also negotiated and contested at regional and local levels.

Building on the land-grabbing literature (Borras & Franco, 2012; Wolford et al., 2025) and Hall, Hirsch and Li’s (2011) framework of the powers of exclusion, particularly the 'politics of legitimacy' this panel explores how these powers operate in and around rangeland commons. We invite empirical and conceptual contributions that bring nuance to the ways rangelands are appropriated, transformed and contested under development, conservation and green-energy transitions. We particularly welcome cases that examine the politics of legitimacy, differentiated impacts on pastoralist communities, and the ways local actors negotiate, resist or accommodate new forms of exclusion.

Societies around the world are increasingly experiencing the impacts of climate change. While more frequent and severe weather events and related natural disasters are creating an uncertain future, much more needs to be done across all levels of society and governance to effectively respond to and adapt to climate change. People’s quality of life worldwide will increasingly depend on the capacity of individuals, communities, and institutions to respond to these changes, adapt to their impacts, and prepare for future events.

This panel will explore what local communities can do to adapt to climate change, which capacities and conditions enable them to act, and why some communities are more successful than others. Particular attention will be given to community-based environmental action, local knowledge, the governance of common-pool resources, organisational capacities, and relationships between communities and public institutions. We invite researchers and practitioners to present examples of community responses to climate change challenges, such as heatwaves, droughts, floods, and other climate-related pressures. We are interested in both traditional and new community responses, in rural as well as urban areas.

By bringing together experiences from diverse communities and contexts, the panel aims to identify and discuss the conditions and practices that strengthen communities’ capacities to mitigate climate-related impacts, adapt to climate change, and build long-term resilience.

Mining industry is an important extractive industry in Indonesia and also in many other countries. It brings economic and social benefits to the surrounding communities and nationally. However, without implementing good mining practice set by the government, mining industry could bring environmental. The loss of forest and biodiversity, and reduction of carbon sequestration due to mining operation has drawn attention from the Government of Indonesia. Sets of regulations have been published and imposed to mining industries across the country. Significant progresses in environmental management, especially reclamation of post-mining land for forest and biodiversity restoration, and carbon sequestration, and also mine water management, have been achieved. This achievement is the result of close collaboration between the government, researchers, and the mining companies. In this panel there will be presented five papers by representatives of the MoEMR, the MoF, the MoE, a researcher from IPB University, and a representative of mining industry. Each presenter would be allocated 10 minutes to present their papers and followed with 40 minutes discussion. The panel is expected to be attended by researchers, NGO’s, government officials, and representatives from mining industries from Indonesia and other countries. The expected output from this panel would be the participant could learn about management of mining industry in Indonesia especially those related to forest restoration, biodiversity conservation, and climate change mitigation in the mining industries in Indonesia; and also new insight from participants for the improvement of the regulation, researches, and implementation of post mining management in Indonesia.

Peatlands are critical commons in tropical landscapes, providing carbon storage, biodiversity, water regulation, and livelihood support, yet they are increasingly exposed to the vagaries of climate, extreme events, and cascading disasters. The ongoing 2026 fires in Kalimantan illustrate how peatlands can be transformed into landscapes of recurrent disaster, with profound consequences for local communities, ecosystems, and governance. This panel examines tropical peatlands across Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea as shared socio-ecological systems whose resilience depends not only on rewetting, revegetation and revitalization of livelihoods, but also on institutions, knowledge, and collective action.

The session will bring together perspectives on regional cooperation, community stewardship, policy design, mapping and monitoring, and livelihood-compatible peatland management to identify pathways to resilience amid growing climate and fire risks. Across many tropical peatland regions, fragmented tenure, weak coordination, limited links among local users, state agencies, and restoration practitioners and large-scale planting of palm oil in Indonesia and Malaysia drive degradation. Additional new risks of conversion to palm oil are emerging in Papua New Guinea. The panel will examine how monitoring, evidence, and participatory planning can improve early warning, accountability, and adaptive management. It will explore which collective arrangements, incentives, and knowledge systems can strengthen peatland commons, particularly where communities rely on peatland resources for subsistence and local enterprises. The discussion will emphasize how local institutions can reduce disaster risk while sustaining ecological functions and community well-being.

Against the backdrop of poverty alleviation and rural revitalization, ethnic minority heritage communities often face a structural tension between poverty reduction and cultural continuity. As a distinctive form of common-pool resource, cultural heritage in tourism development entails both limited excludability and potential rivalry, thereby exposing communities to the risk of a "tragedy of the commons." Taking Wengding Wa Village in Cangyuan County, Yunnan Province, as a case study, this paper adopts a polycentric governance perspective and integrates Elinor Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development framework with her eight design principles. It develops an analytical framework of "exogenous variables–action arena–interaction outcomes and feedback" and employs qualitative mixed methods to examine the institutional arrangements, action logics, and governance effects of community self-governance in the process of poverty reduction.

The study finds that Wengding has developed a layered institutional order that combines Wa customary norms, known as "Awa Li", with modern village regulations. Traditional authorities, including village elders and "moba" ritual specialists, interact with modern organizations such as villagers' meetings and community councils, thereby enabling a coordinated pursuit of cultural transmission and poverty reduction. The community has also established a graduated sanctioning system, ranging from verbal warnings and reputational pressure to monetary penalties and point deductions. These low-cost endogenous constraints help sustain cultural resources and mitigate the erosion of cultural authenticity caused by tourism commercialization. Moreover, the 2021 fire, as an external shock, prompted the community to renegotiate rules and strengthen collective action.

This panel traces the layered ontologies of Indonesia's resilient rice agriculture commons, using “sawah” (wet rice fields) as a method for examining multispecies landscapes, disaster memory, irrigation as a commons, calendrical and cosmological knowledge, and the resilience of rice-growing communities across Central Java, the Batak and Minangkabau highlands, Bali, and West Java.

This panel explores governing the commons beyond the Holocene, examining how commons governance frameworks and institutions may need to adapt to conditions of accelerating environmental and climatic change that depart from the relatively stable conditions of the Holocene epoch in which much commons scholarship has developed.

Following the critiques addressed by postcolonial and decolonial thought against political theory, this panel aims to challenge the dominant notions of the Western Constitutional State when confronted with the postcolonial social struggles of indigenous minorities and their subaltern realities linked to Nature. Although this implies pointing out the limits of and critiques of political theory, the panel also aims to boost the renewal of the understanding of the State and democracy through social theory, highlighting the current decolonial and postcolonial turn in Latin America. In this sense, confronting political theory with the plural concept of ethnic minorities, along with the concrete case of indigenous peoples in Latin America, may prove to be a fertile ground for enhancing a series of considerations useful for reshaping and developing political ecology theory—especially when it comes to the constitutional processes and new forms of the State that the region has experienced over the last decade.Cambios principales explicados

The sustainability of common-pool-resources remain a subject of preoccupation in manycommunities around the world with an underlying issue being the need to design stableinstitutions. The constitutionality approach (Hallet et al. 2016) advanced conditions underwhich commoners create or re-invigorate existing institutions to strengthen their bargainingpower in the face of dealing with different actor constellations (Giessen & Buttoud 2014). Thisapproach also strives to identify what is left of local institutional arrangements – the so-called“last vestiges” of local institutions (Kimengsi et al. 2022). Evidence derived so far points to thefact that one of the pre-conditions (state ratification) represents both a challenge and anopportunity for sustainable common-pool resource governance. Therefore, while actors(re)craft local institutions, their sustainability is compromised by limited higher-level staterecognition. Building on these, the institutional jelling approach (Kimengsi et al. 2025)advances options for bringing together and co-creating formal and local institutional elementsfor common-pool resource governance, addressing the state recognition challenge. Viewinginstitutional jelling as an additive theoretical approach to the constitutionality lens, the panelinterrogates the dynamics of commoning and the role played by interest-based actors in theprocess. The focus is also to understand communing by interest-based actors through thecomplementary theoretical lenses of constitutionality and institutional jelling. The panel equallyinvites critical reflections on the role of actors’ resilience, resistance and collective action usingboth lenses. It builds upon a recently published book on institutional jelling. We invite additionalcontributions on; (i) the potentials and challenges of constitutionality in commons resilience, (ii)jelling opportunities and pathways for interest-based actors in the commons, (iii) actor’sinterests shaping collective action in the commons.

The concept of constitutionality has significantly advanced commons scholarship by demonstrating how legitimate institutions emerge through bottom-up processes of collective action, negotiation, and social learning. While constitutionality explains how commons institutions are collectively crafted, less attention has been paid to how these institutions constitute and sustain relationships, identities, and shared meanings over time. This session argues that the concept of constitutive values, developed in environmental philosophy and increasingly discussed alongside relational values in biodiversity governance, offers a productive way to deepen this perspective. Constitutive values emphasise that relationships with places, species, and ecosystems can become integral to individual and collective identities and shared ways of life. From this perspective, commons institutions are not merely rule systems for governing common-pool resources, but social practices through which relationships among people, places, species, and ecosystems are continually constituted, reproduced, and transformed. Constitutive values thus provide a way to connect constitutionality with growing relational and more-than-human approaches to commons governance. The session asks: What kinds of relationships do commons institutions constitute and sustain? How do these relationships shape identities, shared ways of life, and processes of institutional continuity and transformation? And how might attention to constitutive relationships extend constitutionality towards more-than-human understandings of commons in an era of biodiversity loss and rapid socio-ecological change?

How do communities of beings, human and other-than-human, co-create and govern commons? What does self-governance mean from a more-than-human perspective? Learning from indigenous peoples, Berkes advocates ‘sacred ecology’ as a relational worldview that understands each ecosystem as a more-than-human ‘community of beings’, and ecosystem governance as community-based. This perspective implies diverse forms of commons governance emerging bottom-up from the capacities of community members, both human and nonhuman, to self-organise. The concept of convivial constitutionality from political ecology reflects a similar view of ecosystem governance – ‘living together in a more-than-human world … and setting up rules together for local commons’ – while also attending explicitly to power asymmetries among commoners and how they might be addressed through inclusive participation. These ideas suggest many questions this panel could consider, like: What does it mean for nonhumans to be commoners rather than resources? What can be learnt from cases of nonhumans, from the same and/or different species, taking part in commoning? What kinds of more-than-human relationships contribute to self-organisation of commons governance? How do indigenous and local peoples understand, and act as participants in, more-than-human commons? How can participation by other-than-human beings in commons governance be enhanced, including by promoting their voice and power in deliberations? What roles do, or could, humans play in such processes, and how can the requisite capacities be developed? Insights on these and related issues will better enable commons scholars and practitioners to apply more-than-human perspectives in their efforts to advance social-ecological sustainability.

Since 2006, a group of community leaders, researchers, and students has been conducting a participatory-action research process in the Darién region, along the Colombia-Panama border. The work focuses on a decolonial approach to the history and archaeological remains of Santa María la Antigua del Darién, the first city founded by the Spanish on the Tierra Firme, that is, the continental Americas. Close collaboration with twenty Afro-descendant, Indigenous Embera and Guna, peasant, and settler communities has enabled not only the establishment of a historical and archaeological park, but also the development of bottom-up participatory dynamics for protecting the commons in a region traditionally controlled by armed groups operating outside the law.

Drawing on this experience, the panel seeks to discuss and expand the theoretical perspective of constitutionality to commons related with culture and cultural heritage at risk. In particular, we will explore the following questions: How can the notion of constitutionality be understood in relation to community-led processes aimed at protecting commons associated with the cultural sphere - including local history and memory, archaeology, and cultural heritage - as well as commons that challenge the boundary between nature and culture, such as the worldviews of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities? How can bottom-up rule-making initiatives be consolidated within state structures that were not designed to foster participatory processes? What collective-action strategies can support the protection of cultural commons in territories threatened by war, environmental exploitation, land grabbing, illegal mining, criminal trafficking of drugs, weapons, and human beings, among others?

The Forest Stewardship Council certification (FSC) is understood as a market-based governance mechanism that promotes responsible forest management through voluntary standards, third-party verification, and multi-stakeholder decision-making. FSC certification has been extensively studied through the lenses of market incentives. However, little is known about how FSC certification interacts with shapes and is shaped by institutions governing forest commons. This gap is significant because many forest landscapes, particularly in the tropics, are governed through collective arrangements involving Indigenous Peoples, customary authorities, community forestry organizations, and other forms of commons governance. Understanding these interactions offers an opportunity to enrich both commons scholarship and practical approaches to sustainable forest governance. This panel explores FSC certification through the lens of commons governance and constitutionality. We are particularly interested in understanding under what conditions certification strengthens, transforms, or constrains community-based governance arrangements, and how lessons from commons scholarship can contribute to more resilient and equitable forest governance systems.

Guiding questions include:

1. How does voluntary forest certification interact with locally crafted institutions governing forest commons?

2. Under what conditions does certification strengthen or weaken collective action and commons governance?

3. How do Indigenous Peoples and local communities adapt FSC requirements to local governance systems and customary practices?

4. How does FSC certification influence the resilience in forest commons under increasing social, economic, and environmental pressures?

The major international agencies concerned with conservation and sustainable development recognize the key socio-ecological values of the commons, while pastoralism has been recently recognized for similar values, making therefore pastoral commons a subject of particular interest. Pastoralism uses nearly half of the Earth’s land surface, and a very importantpart of those lands, if not the majority, are under communal governance. Therefore, pastoral commons extend across vast territories, but also span a myriad of biomes and cultures. However, neither pastoralism nor communal governance has been well supported by nation-states . And still pastoralism has started to gain a growing recognition by different states, culminating in 2023’s recognition of transhumance as Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO and in 2026 in the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP) launched by FAO. Pastoral commons are among the most widespread type of commons worldwide and there is now an opportunity for them to receive growing acknowledgment by building on the momentum that pastoralism is going through. The Global Alliance for Rangelands and Pastoralism Working Group on Pastoral Commons has set up a network of over 200 scholars and practitioners, having produced several documents of key importance (https://iyrp.info/pastoral-commons), and wishes to go on discussing about relevant ways to bring pastoral commons to the right degree of international attention they deserve in the context of the ecological and civilizatory transition that is needed. To this end, this panel invites representatives (academics and community members) from all continents to explore possible paths towards gaining institutional support for pastoral commons at national and international levels.

In India, nature–plants, animals, and commons like forests and deserts- has coexisted with communities for centuries. These communities have developed social norms and customary practices that govern their interactions with commons, evolving over time but not in isolation. State structures, both colonial and post-colonial, through their formal legal institutions, have often overridden or failed to recognize the local institutions through which communities governed these commons. In some places, state-imposed restrictions, privatization of commons, or the resulting open access have reduced community access to commons and eroded the local institutions that once governed them. But in many other instances, despite state control and formal legal structures, communities have retained informal institutions that continue to govern their interactions with commons. Through 4 case studies, we present constitutionality as a process through which communities negotiate, adapt, reconstruct, or replace local informal institutions governing commons with changing state and market structures. The study of Amur falcon conservation in Nagaland and Manipur compares different state-community interactions; the study of Gonds’ and Korkus’ forest use in MP explores constitutionality through monetary and non-monetary incentives; the study in Gujarat examines how constitutionality shapes forest-based food knowledge and tribal food enterprises, and the study of Raika camel pastoralism in the Thar desert analyzes state policy and whether constitutionality can include non-human actors at all. These studies show that a nuanced, context-specific, and evidence-supported approach to constitutionality is required to better understand how it plays out across different community spaces and state jurisdictions.

The Biocultural Landscapes Lab (University of Saskatchewan) examines how Indigenous peoples and local communities mobilize, adapt, negotiate, and renew their commons as a foundation for development rooted in their own contexts and worldviews. Current students from the Lab will present cases that show new and adapted ways by which communities draw on their tejido social and the biophysical and cultural commons to sustain collective action, strengthen resilience and navigate conflicts and challenges.

The first case explores a Totonac community in Puebla, Mexico, showing how youth are turning to technological innovations to strengthen the commons, Indigenous livelihoods and endogenous development.

The second case examines how campesino associations in Colombia use the commons as an organizing principle through which local communities build livelihoods, territorial presence, and stability against a backdrop of political and environmental conflict.

The third case focuses on how Mixtec communities in Mexico, navigate relationships with academia, UNESCO, and the state, to safeguard their understandings of biocultural heritage as the foundation of their territorial commons.

The fourth case looks at siembra de agua (or water sowing and harvest), an ancestral practice from the Andes and rooted in collective action, that Zapotec communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, are using to build resilience in the face of severe environmental challenges.

Chair and discussant (Robson) will introduce and comment on these cases; examples of how technology, collective organization, and intergenerational renewal are being used by resource-dependent rural communities to secure local livelihoods, strengthen territorial rights, preserve heritage, and promote endogenous development.

Commoning is not merely about managing interdependent resources efficiently. In many cases, it also seeks to advance social justice, horizontality and inclusivity. These goals, however, are difficult to achieve, as they depend on often unseen negotiations over space, law, authority, time, expertise and access. This panel asks how commoning communities pursue these goals, what barriers they encounter, and how they can overcome them without eroding trust or collective capacity.

We invite contributions addressing questions such as how to balance openness with the need for safer spaces within commoning communities; decision-making arrangements within and beyond conventional assemblies; power asymmetries; progressive sanctions and innovative conflict-resolution practices; and modes of both dialogue and conflict with institutions. These may include observatories and consultative bodies, legal-hacking strategies, the mobilisation of academic expertise, public engagement and neomunicipalist alliances, as well as litigation and legal challenges, organised protests, squatting, public denunciation and coordinated email campaigns.

The panel welcomes empirical and theoretical contributions exploring the limits of, and need for, such negotiations, as well as strategies for scaling commons by widening participation, deepening collective awareness, and supporting the circulation and adaptation of commoning experiences across different contexts.

Heritage is often governed as state property, expert domain or tourism asset. This panel instead approaches it as a commons: an assemblage of goods/resources, communities and rules sustained through commoning. It asks how living traditions - ritual, customary authority, oral transmission or ecological knowledge - operate as institutions that allocate roles, regulate access, reproduce obligations and negotiate change.

Research in Maluku offers a generative starting point. Buka Kampung and keramat renew relations among land, ancestors and villages; Kabata, customary land use and ritual agroforestry sustain spice landscapes; adat authorities, women, youth and neighbouring villages distribute custodianship. These practices show management emerging through performance, memory and social relations, while raising issues of hierarchy, representation and community control amid World Heritage nomination and tourism. Through three to five comparative papers from Indonesia and other island worlds, the panel asks: Who constitutes the heritage community? How are rights, duties and benefits negotiated? When do inherited institutions enable equitable, adaptive and polycentric governance, and when do they reproduce exclusion? How can formal frameworks recognise living rules without freezing, appropriating or commodifying them?

The panel connects heritage and commons scholarship by treating tradition as a dynamic governance repertoire instead of a survival from the past. It seeks to identify principles for community-led management grounded in consent, plural values, intergenerational learning, conflict resolution and accountable relations between customary and public institutions.

Originating in Japan, Satoyama highlights the role of cultural traditions, local institutions, and knowledge systems in supporting collective stewardship of land and natural resources. Comparable systems can be found in Europe. However, in both regions, the relationships linking people, institutions, and landscapes are threatened by environmental degradation, social disruption, and growing threats from external sources.

The SATOCONN Reconnections project addresses these challenges by exploring ways to strengthen land-use governance, ownership, and stewardship in the face of ongoing socio-ecological change. This panel brings together researchers from Japan and Europe to examine how institutions are created, adapted, and renewed within contemporary contexts marked by competing interests, unequal power relations, and differing perspectives on conservation, nature, and rural development.

Our project uses the Living Lab approach, combining participatory methods and multi-actor partnerships to reconnect people, nature and governance. Through practices associated with culturally rich landscapes, the aim is to revitalize collective action and governance to develop more equitable and resilient social-ecological relationships. Contributors will explore how these reflexive and participatory processes can help co-create bottom-up nature- and climate-resilient futures.

The panel examines the challenges and opportunities of rebuilding people-nature connections in the Global North, particularly in areas of high power imbalance, ecological and cultural value. SATOCONN’s findings will be valuable to researchers, practitioners, and environmental organizations engaged in bottom-up institution building and the governance of culturally rich landscapes undergoing economic and political change.

The goal of the panel is to address how and where land management plays a role in the study of the commons, and particularly to unveil the role of changing technologies in measuring, detecting, allocating, regulating, sustaining and improving multiple dimensions of land. The panel aims to discuss and derive the requirements of ‘land intelligence’ and the use of appropriate technologies in the context of responsible land management and rural community development. land not only as a physical resource and an object of management, but also as a domain of knowledge commons. In this sense, land-related data, maps, Indigenous and local knowledge, spatial information, and emerging forms of land intelligence can all be understood as knowledge that is produced, shared, contested, and governed.

A common question running across the different contributions concerns how knowledge about land is created, accessed, represented, and legitimised, and how digital technologies, spatial mapping, and AI may reshape authority, visibility, inclusion, and exclusion in land governance. The contributions related to Indigenous and community knowledge also seem to raise an important question about how these forms of knowledge interact with new technologies without being displaced or marginalised.

Taken together, the panel brings together different perspectives on coastal and rural development, Indigenous knowledge and land relations, technology-enabled spatial planning, territorial AI fairness, and the politics of mapping into a broader discussion about how land-related knowledge and technologies can be governed responsibly and equitably, and how this may contribute to community resilience, collective action, and responsible land management.

Is manufacturing becoming a commons? This panel introduces and explores the emerging concept of the ‘Manufacturing Commons’ as a novel framework for distributed, resilient production made possible by new technologies and approaches. It gathers thought leaders in manufacturing, commons scholarship, peer-to-peer production, Indonesia's makers and the FabCity movement. It will examine how open design, makerspaces, distributed fabrication, repair cultures and circular production networks are reshaping the governance of material production. The panel argues that manufacturing is not already a commons: Despite global interdependence, industrial production remains largely enclosed through proprietary designs, paywalled standards, long supply chains and high barriers to participation. Yet new digitally enabled and community-rooted practices suggest a different possibility: production systems that “scale out” through shared knowledge, local capabilities, federated coordination and collective stewardship of tools, standards and infrastructures. There is the possibility that manufacturing could become a commons. From pandemic-era maker responses to supply-chain failures, to Indonesian maker initiatives and FabCity approaches to urban self-sufficiency, the panel will explore how a manufacturing commons can support resilience, resistance to enclosure and collective action in the face of ecological, economic and technological disruption. It will also address unresolved tensions around quality assurance, accountability, livelihoods, sustainability and inclusion. In doing so, the panel contributes to IASC 2027’s theme by extending commons inquiry into the rivalrous, material domain of manufacturing, with particular relevance for Indonesia and the Global South.

The project Commons of the Alps–An Open Archive for Craftsmanship, Tradition and Innovation (https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/10000223) is developing an interoperable digital archive that collects, organises and makes accessible traditional and innovative craft knowledge from the Swiss canton of Grisons. Based on a scalable data model, a prototypical design commons is being created, which can be expanded into a digital knowledge commons.

The project investigates how digital infrastructures are changing access to local knowledge, as well as its perception and transmission – particularly in areas where craft traditions are under threat. The thematic focus lies on wood, metal, glass and ceramics, textiles and leather, food and agriculture and intangible cultural heritage from the early 20th century to today. Through open-source development, co-creation with regional experts and the highlighting of female actors, a novel knowledge ecology for Alpine cultural regions is created. The project contributes to the future of digital commons, to the transformation of analogue traditions into sustainable knowledge spaces, and to the long-term preservation of Alpine craft practices.

This contribution is well-suited for a panel as it brings together theoretical, methodological and empirical aspects of digital commons. By exploring the prerequisites for creative practices aimed at establishing and maintaining sustainable commons, our presentation also addresses topic 11. It also ties in with theme 7, as our focus region is increasingly affected by climate change while simultaneously facing social challenges such as out-migration. Overall, the presentation is aimed at researchers and practitioners interested in digital knowledge spaces, transformation and sustainable landscape cultures.

Knowledge commons are a critical component of contemporary societies. Digital platforms, open data, online encyclopaedias, participatory mapping and AI increasingly shape knowledge use. This creates new opportunities for collective action and innovation, but raises concerns about participation, institutional design, ownership, legitimacy, representation and power.

This panel focuses on knowledge commons and how digital technologies and AI are reshaping the production, stewardship and circulation of shared knowledge resources. This includes implications for collective intelligence (CI); the capacity of people and technology to work together to generate, evaluate and apply knowledge more effectively. We are interested in how governance arrangements influence the effectiveness, inclusiveness, resilience and legitimacy of knowledge commons across diverse social and environmental contexts. This includes how institutional arrangements shape collaboration and how tensions between openness, quality control, participation and equity are navigated. Understanding these dynamics requires attention to the relationship between technology, institutions and collective action.

The panel seeks contributions on:

•How are knowledge commons governed across different institutional and technological contexts?

•What forms of institutional diversity support productive, resilient and equitable knowledge commons?

•How do digital platforms and AI alter collective action dynamics and processes of CI?

•How can forms of knowledges be combined while avoiding enclosure or marginalisation?

•What governance arrangements support transparency, accountability and data stewardship in digital commons?

•How can computational methods, AI and CI contribute to studying, managing or transforming knowledge commons?

AI systems are creating new ways for people to access, interpret, and use information. Rather than simply directing users to existing sources, AI increasingly summarizes, organizes, translates, ranks, and supports knowledge generation. In doing so, AI is becoming a new infrastructure for knowledge access and use: a system that shapes what information is visible, credible, accessible, and actionable.

Given the newness of these systems, their governance remains an open question. If AI systems mediate access to information, they influence not only what people know, but also how they form beliefs, evaluate evidence, and make decisions. This panel explores AI systems as emerging knowledge infrastructures and examines their implications for knowledge commons. It invites contributions on how these systems can be sustainably governed in ways that preserve access, accountability, transparency, and equity.

Questions this panel could consider include: Who are the actors involved in this new AI knowledge system and how do they interact with one another? How do infrastructure providers, including model developers, platforms, and data holders, influence what information is available and to whom? How are users affected by AI-mediated access to knowledge? How does this shift affect individuals’ perceptions, knowledge, trust, and decision-making? How does it influence different decision-makers, from citizens and professionals to organizations and policymakers? What effects do AI policy and regulation have on information availability?

The transition towards low-carbon and climate-resilient economies is increasingly understood as a question of justice. While the discourse on Just Transition has largely focused on employment, livelihoods and distributional consequences, comparatively less attention has been paid to the politics of knowledge and technology that shape who can participate in, influence and benefit from this transition.

This panel examines the knowledge dimensions of Just Transition, with particular attention to technological change, AI, and knowledge commons. It asks: how can knowledge and technological systems be organised so that the transition to low-carbon economies does not reproduce existing inequalities in access, ownership, capabilities and power?

The panel explores how intellectual property regimes, technology transfer, digital infrastructures, open-source technologies and public knowledge systems influence the distribution of capabilities required for a green transition. It also considers AI's emerging role in generating, disseminating, and governing environmental and technological knowledge, while critically examining whether AI can democratise access to knowledge or instead deepen existing digital, technological, and informational divides. The panel also considers the recognition and protection of indigenous and local knowledge, particularly where it intersects with data-driven technologies and commercial innovation.

By bringing together perspectives from political economy, environmental studies, development studies, technology studies and public policy, the panel seeks to move the Just Transition debate beyond questions of who bears the costs towards questions of who produces knowledge, who controls technology, and who possesses the capabilities to shape the transition.

A new generation of astronomical observatories and large-scale surveys extend human sensing into the wider Universe through distributed networks of instruments and people. Unfamiliar phenomena and anomalies become meaningful through collective sense-making across these living research networks.

In 2027, fifty years after launch, NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 continue through interstellar space carrying copies of the Golden Record, a phonograph record of sounds, images, music and greetings curated to communicate something of life on Earth to unknown others. These sensory probes and their transcultural living archive continually recontextualise material culture and planetary meaning through their voyaging.

A 2025 IASC presentation framed post-detection, the social and cultural processes around unprecedented discovery, as a transdisciplinary creative knowledge commons. The Golden Record provides an astro-ecological research programme for extending this inquiry, connecting plural cultural practices with experimental approaches to meaning-making between Earth and outer space.

De la Cadena and Blaser’s pluriverse, a “world of many worlds,” and Salazar and Gorman’s “pluriversal articulations” offer a frame for distinct worlds and cosmologies entering relation for mutual learning. Situated in Outer Space Studies and commons research, the panel welcomes transdisciplinary and practice-based inquiry. Of interest are experimental art, creative media, participatory and situated research and media and communication research that bring diverse collectives and space imaginaries into shared processes of discovery.

Health of humans and animals is multifaceted. It has a purely private dimension and is probably the highest private asset in a person’s life. Our own health is therefore our highest private good. But health also clearly has an important public and common dimension. By being infected by another person, or by infecting another person with a preventable (or non-preventable) disease, health becomes eminently public and global. We can consider freedom of disease in its rivalrous (where consumption of a good (i.e. available drugs or vaccines) by one person reduces the amount available for others) and non-excludable quality as a common good in Elinor Ostrom’s understanding. By analogy, unhindered spread of disease, leading to outbreaks, or endemic stable transmission of disease can be considered as a ‘tragedy of the commons’, as described by Hardin. Health of humans and animals can thus be understood as a private, public and common good. Health as a commons can be addressed using the Social-Ecological Systems theory of Ostrom. Consequently, game theoretical strategy analyses can be applied to selected health issues. In this panel we want to firstly delimit health as commons from its private and public considerations. We then introduce One Health as an integrated concept and its application to Social – Ecological Systems as One Health in Social-Ecological Systems. We intend to do this by delving in the philosophical and socio-economic underpinnings of health as a commons.

To address health as a commons, we are inspired by the Social-Ecological System (SES) concept of Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom uses a SES approach for the governance of common pool resources. We extend the SES concept by introducing humans as a resource. In the first panel we introduce One Health as an integrated concept and its application to Social-Ecological Systems as One Health in Social-Ecological Systems (OHSES). This panel builds on that panel and discusses how game theoretical strategy analyses can be applied to health issues. The OHSES analysis framework deploys game theory and mathematical modelling for strategy evaluation and comparison. In that way we will be able to analyse the system’s current situation and find possible Nash equilibria, Pareto-optimal solutions, and best resource management strategies while maintaining sustainable ecosystem services. SES is extended to include the human resource system as OHSES and enables us to analyse dilemmas between divergent interests and different strategies with their consequent interventions/interactions and outcomes. Detailed information on different processes and actors’ structures is needed to explicitly include the multi-tier structure and their decision making. This approach can be costly in data gathering, modelling and computation. However, it enables the study of system dynamics in various ways, comparing different strategies. Once the linkages between the different resource systems can be simulated, we are ready to simulate different strategies, followed by a negotiation about these between the actors. From these strategies, payoff functions can be formulated. The panel explores the ways in which the approach could lead to policy recommendations for the government and recommendations for action for all actors.

This session introduces OHSES (One Health–Social-Ecological Systems), a practical framework for understanding how human, animal, and environmental health are interlinked, along with the social, economic, and governance factors that shape them. Building on Elinor Ostrom’s work on collectively governing shared resources, OHSES treats health not as a series of siloed sectoral problems but as an outcome of interactions between resource systems, governance structures, and the actors who depend on them. This framework makes it especially relevant for archipelagic and resource-limited settings where health, ecosystems, and livelihoods are tightly interwoven.

This panel will delve into the basic concept of OHSES, see examples of how it has been applied, and discuss its relevance for facing health-related climate impact, strengthening pandemic preparedness and AMR control in Indonesia, where decentralized geography and diverse governance layers create both unique vulnerabilities and unique opportunities for coordinated, community-driven responses.

For this panel, we invite abstract submissions related to: One Health approaches to climate change and health Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in human, animal, or environmental settings Pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response Application of OHSES or similar systems-based approaches in real-world settings Case studies from Eastern Indonesia or other archipelagic/resource-limited regions Selected abstracts will be invited to present during the session, either as an oral presentation or as part of a panel discussion.

Emerging infections (EIs) & pandemics are shaped by complex interactions among human-animal-environmental systems. In resource-limited settings, they are further compounded by climate change, recurrent disasters, weak health system capacities, & competing societal priorities. Extreme weather, environmental degradation, population displacement, & disruption to livelihoods increase risk of EIs & transmission while simultaneously reducing capacity for prevention, surveillance, & response. Public attention, political priorities, & resource allocation are also influenced by rapidly changing social media narratives & viral events, resulting in reactive rather than strategic responses. We’ll explore OHSES framework to strengthen preparedness, resilience, & governance for EIs & future pandemics. To bring together experts & stakeholders from public health, vet med, environmental & social sciences, disaster risk reduction, climate adaptation, communications, policy, & community organizations. To examine how ecological, social, economic, political, & information-system factors interact to shape disease risks & preparedness outcomes, while also discussing challenges & strategies on information distortions. Key themes include: 1)influence of climate change & disasters on disease emergence & health system vulnerability; 2)mechanisms for integrating human-animal-environmental surveillance in resource-constrained contexts; 3)role of community resilience & adaptive governance in preparedness planning; 4)effects of misinformation, social media amplification, & issue-attention cycles on public health decision-making; & 5)strategies to ensure that policy priorities & investments remain evidence-informed & risk-based rather than driven primarily by viral or short-term political pressures.

Making films has always been a creative form of commoning: it takes multiple people, and is often the result of a concerted effort between filmmakers, participants, and (if applicable) a production team. Using audio-visual methods when studying commoning practices may produce rich and novel data that more traditional research methods cannot reveal. Filmmaking is therefore increasingly popular within the humanities, and even within the small domain of scientific films, various "genres" co-exist, from visual anthropology to experimental video.

Understanding filmmaking as a commoning practice encourages scientists to think carefully about the relationships between researcher(s)/filmer(s) and participants, who take part in the film with varying degrees of engagement at different stages of the filmmaking process. Ethical use of film within research contexts therefore requires just as much — if not more — attention to social and power dynamics, as more conventional commoning research and practice. Furthermore, in the age of social media, streaming platforms and AI, the meaning of visibility and image rights has taken on new implications. How do films continue making sense as commoning experiences aimed at producing scientific knowledge within these spaces saturated with images, and where surveillance has become omnipresent?

This panel aims to bring together researchers from various fields who use film making in their academic work to discuss approaches, ethics and methodologies. The objective is to ask collectively how we, as researchers, film (with) the commons. Applications should not be limited to "classic" documentary forms — diverse and boundary-pushing visual practices are very much welcome and encouraged. Presenters with existing films or media are welcome to show excerpts.

Writing about Gudskul, Parasite Lottery and Serikat Sindikasi, Nuraini Juliastuti observes that “to be useful is to show care towards a specific part of one’s environment—the closest, most immediate context.” Taken as a provocation, her formulation locates responsibility in an immediate world rather than an abstract commons. Across archipelagic worlds, however, the immediate is threaded through relations of people and matter, custom and memory, ecology and infrastructure that extend beyond any single site. How might art and spatial practices work within and across these relations while remaining answerable to the particular worlds from which they emerge?

The panel takes Indonesia and its wider archipelagic and maritime relations as its ground, while welcoming situated accounts of practice and comparative contributions. It asks how art, design and spatial practices participate in these relations. How do maps, archives, infrastructures, performances, rituals, repair and speculative practices reshape who can know, move, decide or refuse? Who performs the often-unseen labour of maintenance and iterative care? What relations, capacities and forms of knowledge do these practices sustain, transform or interrupt across different temporalities—from the rhythms of everyday life to more bounded events and interventions?

Making common need not resolve plural worlds into a single collective whole. Across archipelagic settings, commoning may instead take shape through distinct and overlapping communities, publics and institutions.

The panel asks what becomes common, through which practices and relations, among whom, through whose labour and under what conditions—and when limiting access, protecting opacity or refusing participation may instead sustain particular worlds.

Bringing situated accounts of practice into conversation, the panel will consider authorship, uneven responsibility and commoning failure, asking how art and design participate in composing archipelagic futures without demanding visibility, consensus or unity.

Across Europe and Japan, traditional arts and cultural practices have long emerged from close relationships between people, landscapes, and the wider living world. From seasonal festivals and craft traditions to music, performance, and community rituals, these living cultural expressions embody generations of ecological knowledge, strengthening ties between people, place, and nature while fostering coexistence with other living beings. This panel brings together speakers from diverse living labs across Europe and Japan to explore how traditional culture shapes resilient communities and healthy landscapes. Panelists will share examples of how artistic and cultural practices have evolved alongside local ecosystems, contributing to cultural identity and to the sustainable stewardship of forests, farmland, rivers, and other shared environments.

The discussion will also examine an emerging phenomenon: the growing interest among younger generations in reviving traditional cultural practices. In many rural communities, young people are rediscovering local arts, festivals, and crafts as a way to reconnect with their roots, build a sense of belonging, and contribute to the places they call home. These traditions are becoming a source of heritage and pride, as well as spaces for creativity, connection, and joy.

By highlighting the vitality of these living traditions, and growing inclusiveness through in-migration to rural areas, the panel will consider how culture can be a catalyst for rural revitalization. Stories of pride and participation may inspire more people to reconnect with rural places, strengthening local identities while supporting sustainable landscape management and biodiversity. The session explores how art and culture can help build nature-based futures together.

Living heritage encompasses agricultural systems, traditional ecological knowledge, customary resource management, and cultural practices that communities maintain, transmit, adapt, and transform across generations. Rather than a static legacy, it is a dynamic social process through which communities manage relationships among people, resources, territories, and changing environments.

Living heritage serves as a dynamic foundation for rural commons, livelihood adaptation, and resilience. It connects to spatial, spiritual, and atmospheric dimensions that shape how communities relate to land and resources. Shifting agricultural and livelihood strategies alter how communities use and govern resources, while cultural practices can strengthen belonging and resilience. However, these processes may also generate contestation, inequity, and exclusion.

The panel addresses three questions:

• How does living heritage support rural livelihoods and commons governance amid socio-environmental change?

• How are livelihood strategies, agricultural practices, and living heritage reproduced, adapted, and transformed in response to climate change and market transformation?

• How do changing power relations through agricultural transformation, commercialization, migration, tourism, and digitalization reshape access to, governance of, and benefits from living heritage and rural commons?

By bringing living heritage into dialogue with commons governance, agricultural transformation, climate adaptation, and resilience, the panel examines how rural communities actively reproduce, negotiate, and transform inherited knowledge while responding to socio-environmental change.

Irrigation system plays a vital role in agriculture and reducing vulnerability to uncertain rainfall. It represents a logical unit of analysis in studying collective action in the commons. This is because an irrigation system gives rise to various potential collective action problems such as free‑riding, provision, and monitoring. Rapid technological advances, especially digital technology including AI, now offer new opportunities to lower negotiation and monitoring costs, potentially enhancing irrigation governance considerably. At the same time, however, the effective governance is increasingly strained by socio‑ecological shifts. Many traditional self‑governance arrangements of irrigation systems are eroding or even breaking down under the pressures of climate change, unbridled capital expansion, and misguided state interventions. Designing robust institutions that can better fulfil their regulatory role has therefore become a central challenge for both policy and scholarship during this transitional phase.

This panel aims to synthesize key theoretical and practical lessons from ongoing governance improvement efforts of irrigation systems, with particular attention to emerging questions, perspectives, and theories that can enrich collective action theory.

Themes and speakers are finalised. Topic areas and presentation titles may be refined further as the final stages of our research are completed in Q4 2026 and Q1 2027. This panel brings together researchers working on institutional capacity, the use of science for sustainability, and community-centred approaches to reduce vulnerability and improve wellbeing across reef and fisheries governance in Indonesia and the Philippines, drawing on applied interdisciplinary research that links provincial policy with local implementation, ecological and fisheries science, and participatory work with fishing communities.

This panel examines the role of local communities in governing the commons, with a focus on coastal and small island communities in Indonesia. It brings together case studies on customary and collective resource management practices, the challenges these communities face amid changing tenure and environmental pressures, and the institutional arrangements that sustain collective action in coastal and island settings.

This panel presents work from a trilateral cooperation programme on understanding complex pressures on the transboundary Wadden Sea and the perspectives for action between the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark, drawing on six partner projects addressing climate adaptation, sedimentary processes, biodiversity, transdisciplinary landscape gardening, and ecosystem-based land-sea transition zones. The panel also welcomes contributions on transboundary water governance and management in South Asia.

Ownership has long occupied a central place in commons scholarship. From classic studies of common-pool resources to contemporary debates on legal ownership and property rights, ownership has often been treated as a defining characteristic of the commons and as a key explanation for their emergence, persistence and dissolution. Yet growing historical and contemporary evidence suggests that the relationship between ownership and collective action may be far more complex. Institutions for Collective Action frequently survive profound changes in ownership, legal regimes and political contexts. These observations invite us to reconsider whether ownership is indeed the most appropriate analytical lens for understanding the commons.

This panel invites papers that critically examine the role of ownership and property in the study of commons and other Institutions for Collective Action. We welcome contributions from history, anthropology, sociology, political science, law, economics, geography and related disciplines that explore questions such as: Is ownership a defining characteristic of the commons, or merely one institutional dimension among others? (How) do different forms of property shape collective action? Can institutions for collective action persist despite changes in ownership, legal frameworks or their bundles of rights? What alternative concepts—such as governance, institutional arrangements, perceived utility, commoning, or collective agency—offer better explanations for institutional persistence? How do changing property regimes affect the long-term evolution of commons across different historical and geographical contexts?

How can we reconceptualize commons through shared home-making? This panel brings together three Southeast Asian studies that examine commoning from historical, agrarian, and digital approaches. Rather than treating commons as resources or governance arrangements, it approaches commoning as a process through which people create relationships to place and collective histories. “Making home” provides a lens for examining how belonging, memory, affect, and collective action shape commons. First, the panel examines the early 20th-century Dutch East Indies through the Indische Partij and Douwes Dekker’s efforts to build an inclusive “Indiërs” identity. It shows how a shared political home challenged colonial racial boundaries while reproducing hierarchy and exclusion. Second, it examines the contemporary “SEA-blings” phenomenon, in which social media users across Southeast Asia transform digital interaction and shared affect into mutual aid. Treating these platforms as digital commons, it asks how trust and collective action generate transnational solidarity beyond national borders. Third, it examines the alliance between the Indigenous Batin Sembilan and the Indonesian Peasant Union (SPI) in Hutan Harapan, Jambi. It traces how collective claims, memory, and negotiation transformed a contested landscape into a “new commons.” Rather than emerging from a pre-existing community, it developed through an alliance among actors with different histories and ties to land. Together, the papers examine commoning as collective world-making, showing that commons involve not only resource governance but also belonging, memory, affect, and mutual care. The panel proposes “making home” as an approach to commons research, linking historical, agrarian, Indigenous, and digital approaches. Panelists

Ethics are central to all human actions including governance and research. The panel session invites submissions supporting continued debate and deliberation around ethical issues in the field of commons, common property regimes, and commoning. The session invites talks on the ethical principles and practices of commons and commoning as governance approaches, as well as the ethics of doing research on the commons, particularly participatory, collaborative, and/or transdisciplinary research with communities and practitioners. Inspired by the recently published edited book “Ethics and the Commons: Building Ethical Awareness is research and Practice”, the session aims to showcase research situating ethical and normative issues to the center of core debates in the field. This can include the links of commons and commoning research to normative concepts (e.g., justice, equity, empowerment), stewardship and responsibilities (e.g., leadership, participation), best practices for ethical research, knowledge co-production issues, or other specific ethical topics relevant for environmental governance (e.g., gender, human rights, relationality, human-nature connection). Presentations will be followed by a discussion round with the panelists.

Who shall lead commoning, and what does leadership mean when authority, knowledge, and responsibility are collectively negotiated? Commons scholarship shows that communities can organize to govern shared resources (Ostrom 1999, 2014), but little attention has been given to the leadership practices through which collective action is initiated and sustained across communities, institutions, and scales (Tarrow, 2011).

This panel brings commons governance into conversation with relational and place-based leadership scholarship (e.g., Kempster & Jackson, 2021) to consider leadership as situated practice with collective processes. Drawing on panelists’ research and practice in climate adaptation, river-basin governance, community stewardship, and place-aware policy, panelists explore how actors build and sustain relationships, interpret competing claims, connect knowledge and institutions, negotiate legitimacy, and exercise judgment amidst ecological and political change (McAdam et al., 1996).

The panel asks: Who is authorized to lead in relation to a commons? How do relationships to place shape responsibility? What practices enable collective agency (Ospina et al., 2020)? How might leadership development better prepare practitioners to participate in commoning without reproducing heroic models of change (Raelin, 2016)? The panel contributes to conversations on resilience and collective action by considering leadership as relational work through which commons can be sustained, contested, and transformed.

In an era defined by overlapping ecological crises and economic instability, the commons offer crucial frameworks for community resilience, resource stewardship, and collective survival. Moving away from theoretical models and academic discussions on commoning, this panel centers on "commoning" as an active, localized, and evolving practice. By prioritizing action over abstraction, we examine how diverse communities around the world operationalize collective action to manage shared resources, reclaim public spaces, and establish alternative systems of production and care. This panel brings together empirical case studies from different parts of the world to explore the localized operationalization of commoning. We examine how civil society organizations, grassroots networks, and indigenous groups navigate institutional barriers, legal enclosures, and political pressure. By analyzing practices spanning various geographies the panel looks at the mechanisms that allow collective actions to scale up or endure over time. A primary objective of this panel is to bridge the gap between academic theory and lived practice. Ultimately, this session seeks to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue on how varied global practices of commoning expand our collective imagination for sustainable, community-led futures.

Commons scholarship has provided powerful tools for understanding how communities govern shared resources. Yet contemporary resource challenges increasingly involve a different dynamic: resources that are not simply *given* as a commons or distributed by commoners, but become potentially available through conservation, efficiency improvements, recycling, technological change, or other interventions, often resulting from actions outside the commons.

The concept of the Paracommons, developed by Bruce Lankford, provides a lens through which to examine these dynamics. The paracommons is not simply a “commons of waste,” nor does it refer to any reused resource. Rather, it emerges when a resource previously regarded as over-supplied, lost, wasted, or unavailable becomes the object of prefiguration, generating competing claims from actors who believe it can be recovered or redirected.

The paracommons shifts attention from the narrow question of how much resource can be saved to broader questions: What happens to the resource expected to be saved? Who claims it? Who benefits? Who loses access? And how are these decisions governed? This makes the concept relevant to resource distribution under increasing scarcity and climate change. As governments, farmers, companies, and communities invest in efficiency, recycling, resource recovery, and circularity, new resource flows may emerge and become objects of allocation, negotiation, and contestation.

This panel welcomes contributions from water, food, fisheries, forestry, carbon, urban resources, nutrients, fertilizers, waste, and other domains where resource changes driven by scarcity and variability create opportunities for efficiency or circularity whose consequences can be questioned from a paracommons/commons perspective.

The world has no shortage of multilateral environmental agreements. From climate change and biodiversity to land degradation, water security, and wildlife conservation, global treaties have established ambitious goals and commitments. Yet, despite decades of international environmental governance, many of the challenges these agreements seek to address continue to deepen.

Global environmental agreements establish broad frameworks, but their implementation depends on institutions and actors operating at multiple scales. Governments, local communities, indigenous peoples, civil society organizations, researchers, and other stakeholders must negotiate competing interests, coordinate action, mobilize knowledge, and develop institutional arrangements capable of responding to context-specific environmental challenges.

The proposed panel therefore focuses on a central question: How can global environmental commitments be translated into effective forms of collective action and locally grounded governance? By bringing together empirical and theoretical perspectives from climate governance, biodiversity conservation, wildlife management, land and water governance, and other domains of environmental policy, the panel seeks to contribute to broader debates on collective action, and the governance of common-pool resources.

Rather than viewing local institutions merely as mechanisms for implementing decisions made at higher levels, the panel invites consideration of a more reciprocal relationship between scales: How might insights from locally embedded systems of commons governance reshape the assumptions, institutions, and practices of global environmental governance?

Tanah Papua’s biodiverse tropical ecosystems form the social, economic, and spiritual foundation for Customary Law Communities (Masyarakat Hukum Adat / MHA). However, rapid development, resource extraction, and land-use changes without sufficient MHA participation present ongoing challenges to ecological sustainability and customary governance. While administrative and institutional hurdles remain, stakeholders increasingly recognize the necessity of aligning regional policy with traditional resource stewardship. In response, Indigenous communities are engaging legal and formal administrative avenues to safeguard their ancestral territories. Through participatory mapping, customary documentation, and policy dialogue, clans are securing legal recognition via Ancestral Domain Registration Agency (BRWA) filings, regional regulations (Perda), and Regent decrees (SK Bupati). These initiatives lay the groundwork for governing the commons, especially through customary forest (hutan adat) designations and sustainable community livelihoods. This panel brings together academics, state representatives, civil society, and Indigenous leaders to explore collaborative pathways for sustainable resource governance. By examining community-led initiatives alongside official policy mechanisms, the session highlights strategies to strengthen legal protections, mitigate land-use conflicts, and integrate indigeneity into regional governance frameworks across Tanah Papua.

This panel examines the science and practice of scaling the commons for sustainability, bringing together perspectives on how effective governance regimes for common-pool resources, public goods, and common property regimes can be scaled up, down, and out, including community-based approaches to ocean conservation.

In this session, the International Journal of the Common’s editors-in-chief will moderate an interactive conversation with attendants about the current state of the academic publishing industry (including rising publishing volumes, increasing dominance from publishing companies, a transforming open access environment, and “publish or perish” incentives) and the role of the IJC. The goal of this session is to generate a community-driven vision for the IJC as we center, serve, and build the commons community.

In addition to papers and workshops, a series of short film screenings will play during the IASC conference to speak to the topic of commoning. These topics may include community decision-making, justice, land grabbing and pre-figurative fictions or other aspects. Depending on the submissions they will be screened in either thematic or compiled to make a 90 minute session. Please submit films under 60 minutes only, and include a trailer, a crew and cast list, running time, and an indication of screening rights for educational purposes.

At the campus of Unhas, there is opportunity to share the region's distinct cultural heritage in a 4–6 hour workshop on unique crafts of the local region: music, fabric, story, performance or other medium. Taught in a peer-to-peer learning style, there will be opportunity to disclose environmental challenges or cultural threats and new opportunities for the arts. We invite local musicians, painters, fabric makers, storytellers, performers, and contemporary artists who are interested in teaching to a broad audience over one day. Teachers will be paid a fee. Please submit your workshop name, medium, your biography, images of your work, and the materials and space you will need to run a workshop.

Institutional diversity, i.e. the variety of rules and norms used to govern shared resources, is considered important for effective governance. However, we still have limited understanding of how institutional diversity relates to governance outcomes. One reason is the lack of clear and systematic methods for studying institutional diversity in comparative large-N research. This Methods Lab panel welcomes contributions presenting methodological advances for the systematic and comparative study of institutional diversity, including quantitative approaches, as well as empirical studies comparing institutional diversity across cases. Other potential contributions may examine the factors shaping institutional diversity and its association with governance outcomes, including effectiveness, resilience, and wellbeing.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence are expanding opportunities to analyze large and diverse datasets and to develop computational simulations of governance processes and scenarios relevant to common-pool resources. This Methods Lab panel will provide a space to present and discuss methodological developments, empirical applications, and theoretical implications of AI-assisted methods in commons research, with a particular focus on large language models (LLMs).

Potential contributions may examine the use of LLMs to identify, extract, classify, or code institutional information using Ostrom’s design principles, rule typologies, the Institutional Grammar, or other analytical frameworks, as well as to identify governance outcomes such as effectiveness, resilience, or wellbeing. Contributions may also present other machine-learning applications for analyzing quantitative, spatial, network, behavioral, or other types of data; identifying patterns and institutional configurations; predicting governance outcomes; or simulating interactions among actors and institutions. Presentations may additionally address the construction and validation of training datasets, comparisons between human and automated analyses, and the reliability of research results. Beyond coding and prediction, the panel welcomes contributions exploring how AI-assisted methods can support comparative analysis, evidence synthesis, theory development, and the study of governance systems more generally.

The panel aims to connect researchers already applying these methods with those interested in exploring their potential, limitations, and implications for common-pool resource research, and to foster future methodological and substantive collaborations.

The growing interest in commons and commoning as forms of socionatural organisation, movements and emancipatory politics calls for relational and critical approaches and methods. We consider that feminist perspectives are particularly well positioned to inform approaches and methods on commons and commoning in this regard:

i) epistemologically, they enable a situated, critical, and reflexive stance on knowledge production;

ii) practically, they promote an embodied, experiential perspective to non-extractive forms of research that can help build new imaginaries and counter-narratives ; and

iii) conceptually, they draw attention to relatively understudied concepts in commons studies, such as care, gendered and other social inequalities in reproductive work, and reconnect scales from the body to micropolitics and macro-economic and political structures.

This panel session draws on a co-authored paper by the panel convenors and colleagues, that speaks to the relevance and invisibility of feminist epistemologies, methodologies and methods in commons and commoning studies. The session will welcome methodological contributions addressing the following questions:

• What new insights do feminist methodologies and methods bring to the study of commons and commoning? These include attention to exclusion inside the commons/commoning institutions and against them

• What are the tensions and practical challenges in leveraging feminist methods in commons studies? These include among others the mismatch between feminist practice and academic and donor incentives and the uneven distribution of labour that collaborative feminist work demands.

• What actionable methods emerge from this attempt to enable collaboration between feminist and commons/commoning scholarship?

Field experiments have become an increasingly valuable approach for understanding how individuals and communities govern common-pool resources under real-world conditions. This panel invites empirical studies that use field experiments to investigate collective action, institutional design, cooperation, and decision-making in the governance of commons. We welcome contributions from traditional resource systems, including irrigation, forests, fisheries, rangelands, and water resources, as well as emerging commons such as distributed energy systems, digital commons, data commons, and other shared infrastructures. Studies may examine the effects of governance arrangements, incentives, information, technology, or environmental change on behavior and outcomes. We particularly encourage submissions that bridge theory and practice and generate insights for the design of resilient, equitable, and sustainable commons governance.