20 accepted roundtables across 11 themes.

A remarkable moment happened in Indonesia a decade ago, whereby the first area of state forest land was formally returned to an Indigenous community: the Kajang of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. In Kajang and elsewhere, securing landmark legal recognition of the commons nevertheless continue to face collective resource governance challenges. In this session, we aim to move beyond legal titling as a restoration of the commons, and propose following the lived trajectories of post-recognition. We ask: How have local governance structures, daily management practices, livelihoods, and social relations transformed since recognition? In this panel we center the Kajang case, and explore pivotal questions of the commons by examining the ways customary institutions have navigated state oversight, regional development, and internal generational dynamics.

To analyze this ten-year trajectory, the session introduces a theory of inheritance. The lens allows the panel to interrogate not only what the forest was at the moment of titling, but more specifically, extends into the ways land relations have changed hence. To do this we re-assemble key members of the policymaking taskforce and local community representatives—customary leaders and community members, local government officials, NGOs, and scholars—and examine the practical challenges, institutional dilemmas, and real-world outcomes of customary forest management. The session also explores emerging horizons beyond forests, specifically the broader political groundwork for future land control.

The session pairs the in person panel at the main conference in Makassar with a linked 2-day immersive field workshop in Kajang territory, grounding theoretical debates in place-based, multi-generational dialogue.

This roundtable brings together eight interdisciplinary perspectives to show how the “fluid commons” are lived worlds of relation, dispossession, mobility, and repair. It asks how land–water worlds across Southeast Asia and the wider Indian Ocean are produced, enclosed, contested, and reclaimed through historical, ethnographic, literary, hydrosocial, ecological, justice-oriented, and decolonial lenses. The discussion begins with brief opening interventions from each panelist, followed by moderated discussion around two shared questions: how fluid commons are enclosed by state, market, and security regimes, and how they are reimagined through commoning, memory, and repair. Syed Farid Alatas opens by critiquing the terracentric bias of island and archipelagic studies and calling for concepts grounded in non-Western intellectual traditions. Wai Liang Tham examines the Klang River Basin, where hydromodernisation and racial governmentality reduce land and water to separate environmental factors. Siriporn S. turns to border commoning on the Thailand–Myanmar frontier, where mobility and livelihood are inseparable, while Melani Budianta considers commoning as resistance to reclamation and blue-economy development in Jakarta Bay. Nia Deliana traces the enclosure of precolonial Bay of Bengal maritime networks under colonial and contemporary security regimes, while Sharmani P.Gabriel proposes “tanah air” as a hydrosocial method for reading Malaysian literature. Fadzilah Cooke examines Indigenous and mobile communities across the Sulu–Sulawesi Sea, exposing the limits of state-centred and environmental justice categories. Lian Gogali closes with a regenerative perspective from Lake Poso, where community memory and women’s knowledge reclaim reciprocal relations between humans and water.

Aquatic resources and ecosystems have many shared characteristics that make them an increasing challenge for commons governance. Aquatic environments are essentially embedded in cyclical relations between land, fresh and saltwater ecologies and livelihoods. Despite these characteristics, conventional norms of ownership, access, and governance are premised on terrestrial conceits, which often produce misfits with the dynamics of aquatic systems. While the Earth is a water planet, boundary-making grounded in terrestrial biases may be limiting our ability to achieve equitable and sustainable shared resource governance.

This roundtable sets out to enquire how far drawing fresh, brakish and saltwater commons together is both of theoretical and practical value. Where are the shared issues across rivers and lakes, glacial and groundwater, swampy, coastal and high seas commoning, governance and enclosure struggles? We take inspiration from Peters and Steinberg’s (2015) argument that adopting ‚fluid ontologies‘ would benefit planetary health. ‚Fluid ontologies‘ assume motion and deep forms of cyclicality, volume, temporal dynamics and interdependence.

The roundtable conversation takes up this challenge: what examples of aquatic commoning already exist? What are the limits or disadvantages of such world-making? The thrust of ‚Fluid ontologies” is comparable to a substantial range of Indigenous worldviews on “ridge to reef” environments. What can be learnt from Indigenous-led and -influenced transformations in aquatic commoning and governance? We will use an open call to assemble a group of academic and more-than-academic participants. The roundtable will kick off with five-minute statements from participants, and then be moderated with audience participation.

This roundtable examines case studies of urban/kampung commoning across the Global South, foregrounding diverse strategies for sustaining informal urban spaces amid increasing privatization. Rita Padawangi will begin by discussing the kampung, a sprawling informal residential area within Southeast Asian cities, as a space for human agency that underpins collective commoning. Drawing on her case studies of kampungs in Surabaya and Jayapura, she illustrates how communities collectively maintain, transform, and negotiate shared spaces through everyday practices. Sit Tsui will then discuss rural-urban commoning in contemporary China as a ground-level strategy of delinking that resists structural subordination and advances people-centered initiatives. Ahmad Khairuddin will explore how rural and urban commoning takes place through "Sedekah Bumi", a traditional ritual that expresses solidarity with non-human ecologies damaged by reckless urban development. Guntoro Muhammad will showcase the paradigmatic shifts and commoning practices that emerge when landed urban kampungs are transformed into high-rise housing. Redy Eko Prastyo will introduce his concept of transdisciplinary commoning between kampung dwellers and surrounding universities. Pakorn Lertsantienchai will share findings from his 2026 survey of independent bookstores in Thailand, considering them as strategic spaces of the urban commons. Viriya Sawangchot will conclude the roundtable discussion by examining transnational and transcultural forms of urban commoning across Southeast Asian cities, focusing on how the DIY, bottom-up establishment of Japanese "Raibu Hausu" in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Manila creates cultural spaces and infrastructure that support young and precarious artists and musicians across Asia.

Food systems are increasingly shaped by forces that extend far beyond local production and consumption: climate disruption, volatile commodity markets, trade fragmentation, shifting investment flows, and growing geopolitical competition over food, energy and critical resources. These forces put pressures on the governance of food as a common by reshaping access to resources, distribution of risks and benefits, and decision-making power across food systems.

This panel uses scenario building to explore how food commons may evolve under contrasting geoeconomic futures. It examines three interconnected arenas of collective actions: —regenerative food production and farmer-led service systems, institutional procurement through schools and public nutrition programmes, and inclusive distribution and circular food initiatives. Together, these arenas illustrate how communities, public institutions, and market actors negotiate responsibilities, resources and benefits in increasingly uncertain contexts.

The scenarios are used not for forecasting outcomes, but rather as a tool to explore collective-action dilemmas, power relations and institutional choices. How can local food systems remain resilient and inclusive when exposed to climate shocks, trade volatility, and market concentration? What forms of public–community–market coordination can strengthen food security while advancing ecological, nutritional and economic goals? How can collective investments in regenerative agriculture, climate adaptation and mitigation, and risk-sharing mechanisms support both stewardship of shared resources and equitable development?

By exploring alternative futures, the panel advances understanding of how food commons can be governed.

The concept of food scarcity, which relies on the Western gaze, cannot fully be implemented in the Indonesian context. One of important aspect food scarcity happened is because Soeharto’s food self-sufficiency program which focused on making rice as a staple commodity. In reality, traditional Indonesian communities have their own staple foods such as tubers (Java), sago, and sorghum (Eastern Indonesia). However, policy diversification currently serves only as a celebration of local food richness and is not internalized within the community. Using Ostrom (1990) concept of governing the commons, this research believes to achieve national food sovereignty, national government through government in each municipality should build relationships within the local community. Only by this the food diversification can fully implement.

Commons governance challenges are deeply interconnected, cutting across social, economic, and environmental systems. No single actor can address these issues alone. Research highlights the role of polycentric governance, networked institutions & collaborative decision-making in improving governance effectiveness, institutional durability & long-term resource management.

Multi-actor platforms, or multi-stakeholder platforms or forums, recognized as essential governance mechanisms in decentralized & co-managed resource systems, facilitate multi-scale engagement, linking local community efforts to national & sub-national policy implementation. Many support decision-making centering priorities of those frequently marginalized, notably poorer households, women, and Indigenous groups. They often function as nested governance mechanisms that activate or reinvigorate existing or defunct democratic institutions and processes.

This roundtable centres around the actual functioning of such platforms or processes (for more nascent efforts). It convenes practitioners & researchers working across geographies to share applied experiences from such platforms, each reflecting on one specific dimension of practice. These dimensions may include institutional convergence, rule enforcement, influencing public funds, negotiations between resource claimants, conflict, accountability, & power asymmetries and inclusion.

Spotlighting promising experiences & draws practical insights on navigating the tensions and complexities such platforms engender: it addresses an important mechanism for democratic governance of the Commons (theme 6), surfaces the power dynamics between actors (theme 8) & highlights unresolved challenges that inform discussions in the Practitioners’ Lab.

The global environmental governance landscape is undergoing a regime change driven by shrinking civic spaces and the triple planetary crisis of climate, biodiversity loss, and pollution. This shift has drawn multiple actors across scales into the continuum of natural resource governance, often with overlapping and competing interests, goals, and rationalities.

Many argue that dominant policy practices addressing single crises often overlook the interconnectedness of their underlying causes. For instance, biodiversity conservation and climate interventions have often produced new geographies of accumulation by dispossession, further reshaping nature-society relations. In response, local communities have mobilized to resist these top-down and racialized environmental approaches, offering alternative, community-driven solutions. Yet these forms of resistance are unfolding within shrinking civic spaces, where opportunities to participate in decision-making, contest dominant environmental agendas, and defend territorial and resource rights are becoming more constrained. The tension between expanding conservation and climate agendas and narrowing spaces for participation, alongside limited environmental and research resources, underscores the need to critically examine not only the effectiveness of the environmental approaches, but also whose voices, rights and knowledge are recognized in defining and implementing climate solutions.

Against this backdrop, the Transdisciplinary Political Ecology (POLEN) Node at the University of Calgary calls for abstract submissions to create spaces of possibility and foster dialogues by critically analyzing the dominant conservation-extractive-development-climate narratives and practices shaping the governance of commons.

How might design create conditions for commoning rather than ‘designing commons’? Design is often understood as a practice of intentionally creating change, while commons are associated with continuity, stewardship and endurance in time. If commoning is a critical civic capacity for climate adaptation and 'readiness', what should design be doing differently to support this? Given how ill-suited many urban environments are to a changing climate, far-reaching change seems necessary. Yet does technocentric solutionism directly threaten a capacity for commoning?

Design and commons begin with different understandings of the social and material world. Design is concerned with shaping sociomaterial futures, while commons are more concerned with the social relations, governance practices and forms of care that sustain collective life. The complex materiality of the made world, its ongoing production, acceleration and ontological implications, calls for an expanded understanding of biophysical commons as well as an expanded set of capabilities to meet this designed world. What tensions and synergies emerge from these differing orientations to sociality and materiality? How do designing and commoning intersect as intentional practices of world-making?This roundtable builds on plenary discussions at Griffith University’s 2025 Design + Commons symposium, which revealed significant opportunities for dialogue between design and commons scholarship and practice, while surfacing important tensions around governance, care, sociomateriality, Indigenous sovereignty, value creation and collective action. Revisiting these themes, the roundtable will engage the broader IASC community through a series of provocative questions, circulated in advance, at the intersection of design and commons.

Constitutionalism, or the descriptive philosophy of what constitutions are, is an idea accessible to all, even where constitutions are not. The legitimate use of power and the democratic arrangement for its exercise are integral to the idea of constitutionalisms. Hence, local constitutionalisms offer multiple opportunities not only to define the modes through which power must be exercised in participatory environmental governance but also to define what it is to be ‘local’ in an increasingly interconnected world. The concept is both a legal idea and a placeholder for social, political, and economic justice. Since constitutionalisms have always donned many roles, from culturally transformative (Tushnet, 2026) to anti-colonial and symbolic, a local institution-led, grounded constitutionalisms is a radical but entirely plausible conception. In this roundtable, we invite scholars and practitioners to offer designs for constitutionalisms—what they mean and what they can offer in the social transformations we seek. We ask participants to offer frames of governance for commons that challenge the inefficiencies of the top-down approach. Further, we also explore imagining cross-cultural, transnational co-operation and solidarities that enliven new forms of constitutionalisms. Commons, especially, demand learning and articulating ideas that are unbounded by territory. Consequently, new constitutionalisms calibrated around the notion of the commons afford anti-imperial solidarities and epistemic networks that further strengthen the rule of law and democracy. The roundtable hopes to forge concrete means to maximise this opportunity by creating effective local governance and global networks to sustain such grounded constitutionalisms.

Self-governance by Indigenous Peoples and local communities is now widely recognised as central to responding to planetary crises. Yet, simply recognising local institutions, or integrating them into polycentric governance, is not enough where communities face historical marginalisation, institutional erosion, political-economic pressure and novel environmental threats. In such contexts, “external catalyzing agents” (Haller et al. 2016) such as government actors, NGOs, or philanthropic foundations, may support local institution-building with funding, political accompaniment, and technical expertise.

Such support is often both vital and risky. While external actors are increasingly committed to “community-led” approaches, they can inadvertently increase state or market control, introduce new ways of relating to the environment, create financial dependencies, and place environmental blame and burdens on communities. But this is not inevitable. Local actors may also leverage thoughtfully designed external support to develop pragmatic and durable institutions.

This roundtable convenes scholars and practitioners working across different contexts and positionalities, to ask critical questions about the role of external support in catalysing self-governance. How do these efforts (re)shape local priorities, processes, and politics? How should we characterise the hybrid arrangements that emerge? Which forms of support have demonstrably strengthened local institutions, and which conditions make success durable? Who ends up carrying responsibility for the outcomes, and who doesn’t? Participants respond to short provocations based on their own research and practice, followed by facilitated discussion, aiming to mobilise further thinking and research on these questions.

Generative AI is built on digital commons: open datasets, open-source code, yet its rise is destabilizing the conditions sustaining them. Massive automated extraction, synthetic content pollution, infrastructural overload, and asymmetric value capture are straining the collectively governed infrastructures on which open knowledge depends. Communities respond in divergent ways: access restrictions, negotiated reciprocity through paid APIs, or renewed governance. How do digital commons adapt to ensure their sustainability under these conditions? How is the digital commons model, based on collective governance and openness, adapting to an AI-dominated internet? Is openness becoming “conditional” to governance capacity, funding, and reciprocity mechanisms?

This roundtable brings together practitioners who run digital commons infrastructures and scholars of commons governance to debate: how can digital commons survive and shape the age of AI? The discussion opens with a brief presentation of VIADUCT, a research project carried by Inria in association with GPAI, which has been mapping AI-driven vulnerabilities of digital commons infrastructures (e.g. asymmetrical appropriation, reciprocity breakdown, trust erosion) and the institutional trajectories emerging in response. Participants will then debate three questions: What is actually breaking — are threats existential or manageable? (2) Which governance, legal, economic, and technical mechanisms can reconnect AI-scale reuse with contribution and maintenance? (3) What alliances between commons communities, public institutions, and AI actors could turn extraction into reciprocity? The session aims to bring together commons scholarship and practice to sketch a strategic agenda going beyond simple defensive postures.

Commoning in media environments cannot be designed or imposed from above; it must be located in practices that communities already cultivate and negotiate experimentally and imperfectly. This roundtable extends Melani Budianta's formulation of commoning (2019, 2022) as ongoing, situated social labour by centring media technologies as the infrastructures through which commoning is practised and constrained across Indonesia. We argue that commoning has continually developed within changing regimes of enclosure, from colonial communication infrastructures repurposed for anticolonial resistance to contemporary digital platforms that embed surveillance and commodification into the architectures through which communities attempt collective life. Panelists bring research spanning the Malay-language women's weekly Soenting Melajoe (1912-1921); the commoning of critical labour knowledge through cross-institutional digital networks; Islamic web series and the participatory negotiation of pious identity among young Muslim women; practice-based artistic knowledge as shared resource at Studio Kalahan in Yogyakarta; and regional cinema's challenge to Jakarta-centric production through Bataknese cultural commoning. Locating these practices also requires attending to the historical sociotechnical trajectories that inform them, from print to platform to machine learning model. How do scholars trace what already exists without foreclosing speculation about the futures these practices might enable? And how does this methodological demand reshape commons scholarship when the cases are Indonesian? Each panelist delivers a five minute provocation, followed by facilitated conversation with audience participation.

Open science often refers to research practices and outputs that are “freely accessible” to anyone. The core tenets are familiar: citizen science projects that enable public participation in data collection, open data-sharing guidelines, open-access publications, and open source software and hardware. Open science practices have received both praise and critique; proponents highlight its potential to lead to reproducible, transparent science, while opponents raise concerns about extractive practices and infringements on data sovereignty. How will open practices contend with the role of AI in scientific research, as it expands across disciplines and publishing norms? In this roundtable, we will distinguish between open versus community-controlled technologies in science and speculate on knowledge commoning futures that do or do not include open science. We will convene practitioners across the open science spectrum, inviting them to participate in three table discussions:

1. The role of open source technologies in open science

2. Data sovereignty in the age of AI

3. Public participation and citizen science in the commons

This roundtable will draw on expertise from the Socioenvironmental Knowledge Commons (SEEKCommons) project, a network of STS scholars examining open science and the commons. The roundtable will open with a 5-minute introduction, framing the central question and discussion topics. Participants will then rotate through three 25-minute table discussions, facilitated by members of the SEEKCommons network, before closing with a 10-minute overview. This forum will provide insights on project governance and stewardship of open projects, resulting in a registered report on the open source educational platform Gala (www.learngala.com).

Drawing on Donna Haraway's concept of "more-than-human kinship" extended to microbial intimacy between humans and HIV, this roundtable presents a collaborative multispecies auto-ethnography authored by four young leaders living with HIV (YPLHIV) in West Java, Indonesia. Amidst rising criminalization, dehumanizing stigma, and structural violence, the panelists re-examine health governance through embodied co-existence with the virus. Riki Jakaria reflects on microbial kinship with HIV and STI pathogens as a transformative rebirth, exploring the collective "joy of having HIV" in community leadership. Muhammad Alfarizi examines kinship across human, virus, and the sacred landscape of Gunung Talaga Bodas, where nature's call resisted his suicidal intent, fostering radical integrity that disarms dehumanizing stigma. Abdul Karim shares how HIV as a life teacher catalyzed healing from depression, shaping community shelters and "listening buddy" mental health support. Arip Triyatna details grassroots outreach in Ciamis, showing how resisting discriminatory local policies rekindles life purpose through viral kinship. Shifting from technocratic control to embodied kinship, this roundtable addresses a pressing question: What health, social, and policy support systems can emerge when conceptualizing health commons through human-viral kinship in a world fraught with discrimination, violence, uncertainty, and exploitation?

Health of humans and animals is multifaceted. It has a private dimension and is probably the highest private asset in a person’s and animal’s life. But health also has an important public and common dimension. By being infected by another person or animal, or by infecting another with a disease, health becomes eminently public and global. We can consider freedom from disease in its rivalrous and non-excludable quality as a common good from Elinor Ostrom’s perspective. The other extreme are situations of unhindered spread of disease, leading to outbreaks or endemic stable transmission of disease. Health of humans and of animals can thus be understood as a private, public and common good.

This roundtable encourages an exchange of perspectives between different stakeholders and challenges the perspective which views health as private and public goods. The main aim is to create space for a joint process to consider health as a commons. Proposed process of the roundtable:

Panelists are asked for which aspect of their health they considered as a private good (e,g. Oral health), for which aspects they considered it a common good, which means, it depends on community of public engagement, like the provision of sufficient safe drinking water, or pandemic vaccination. Thirdly, they are asked for which aspects of their health they consider to be a public good, like clean air. In this way we can delimit health as a commons from health as private or public goods. A next step would be to ask about who were the main actors and governance issues to manage health as a commons. In further step, the audience can ask questions and share their own experiences.

Mountains have long provided strongholds for local and Indigenous forms of commons governance that have enabled communities to survive and thrive. With extreme climatic and environmental conditions and limited accessibility, mountains impeded conquest and control by invaders and nation-states, allowing many communal systems to evolve and endure. But in the past century, improved transportation, communications and technologies have exposed mountain commons to new risks and opportunities. Simultaneously, mountain communities are experiencing unprecedented challenges due to climate change, external interventions, political and economic pressures, and increasing migratory flows into and out of mountains. Given these complexities, this roundtable will present case studies from mountainous regions around the world to explore: How are mountain commons (e.g., water, forests, arable land, alpine pastures) being governed and transformed as communities strive for adaptation and resilience? What can be learned from the experiences of mountain communities and their communal practices amidst global challenges? Specific examples will illustrate how communities are dealing with threats of commons degradation or expropriation, inappropriate policies, climatic uncertainties, disruption of intergenerational knowledge transmission, and problems posed by emerging or intensifying tourism, migration, mining operations, and commodification of traditional products. Particular attention will be given to cases that provide ideas and lessons for resilient and adaptive commons governance.

We invite researchers and practitioners to join this roundtable to share their insights, highlighting good practices as well as the serious challenges that are transforming mountain commons and their communities.

At the 2006 Bali conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP), the association voted to drop "property" and become the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC). It signaled a widening of IASC’s scope to commons without a major role for "property," such as digital commons. Others argued it would sideline property as an analytical problem. The conference now returns to Indonesia after twenty years, amidst intensifying contentions over the commons in the face of the intersecting crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and extreme inequality. Recent scholarship has also brought property back into contention. Scholars of critical property and environmental justice flag the tendency to address institutions outside of the history, power, and property relations that structure who can claim the commons. On the other hand, some scholars are beginning to argue that “property” is transforming in the context of “market grabbing,” where markets are becoming a form of private property, a trend now widespread.

This roundtable brings together scholars from diverse disciplines and regions to reflect on the legal, political, and economic entanglements of contentions over rights to the commons. The panelists will debate:

1. How does extending "property" beyond legal "ownership," e.g., extending bundles of rights, such as tenure rights, to include "bundles of powers," help navigate competing claims to the commons?

2. What does the scholarship on markets across settings, e.g., urban commons, natural resources/commodities, carbon/biodiversity offsets, teach us about commons governance?

3. What does critical scholarship on commons and commoning tell us about the relationship between property rights and governance?

Research on polycentric governance is one of the most influential frameworks for understanding collective action, commons governance, and complex social-ecological system challenges. While the field has expanded substantially, important debates remain regarding conceptual clarity, operationalization &, measurement to allow for comparative analysis, and foundational, structural conditions (e.g., legal/institutional rules) that influence how polycentric governance systems develop over time. Polycentric governance research spans multiple common domains, disciplines, and geographic contexts that doesn’t permit placement within a single thematic track, making this roundtable a natural fit for the conference’s "Open Call and Emerging Approaches" theme, which invites an interdisciplinary audience to engage with us in an agenda-setting discussion. This roundtable will convene 10 scholars (5 in-person, 5 virtual participants) working in the Ostrom tradition and related governance research communities to engage in a structured discussion to answer big questions to advance polycentric governance research: What are the most important theoretical, methodological, and empirical priorities for advancing polycentric governance research over the next decade? How can polycentric governance scholars build a coordinated research community and agenda? The goal of the roundtable is to identify key gaps in existing scholarship, establish priorities for future comparative research, and foster new collaborations among scholars working across disciplines and policy domains. Discussion will focus on four, central themes: (1) conceptual development; (2) theory and methods; (3) empirical applications; and (4) strategies for strengthening an international polycentric governance research community.

Commons are complex adaptive subsystems embedded in wider social-ecological systems, continually interacting with multiple other subsystems. Initiatives worldwide increasingly adopt ‘emergent’ approaches that mirror this complexity.

This roundtable convenes practitioners and researchers to share, critically reflect, and learn from methods they are applying or co-designing to understand and evaluate systems transformation initiatives – particularly those co-created with communities, civil society partners, and state actors.

Panellists will each share 1-2 methods they are employing or evolving in collaborative initiatives, potentially including systems change and political economy analysis, network analysis of coalitions and multi-actor governance platforms, Institutional Grammar, outcome harvesting, narrative analysis, and socio-ecological health assessment tools – often combining established frameworks in experimental, interdisciplinary ways.

The roundtable explores two overarching questions:

• How can long-term rigorous study methods be combined with more fuzzy, sensemaking-oriented modes of analysis, and what tensions emerge from this combination?

• When co-evolving such methods, what principles support shared ownership—both of the methods and of the insights they generate?

This roundtable directly addresses the first core question of the Methods Lab by sharing new methods practitioners are employing, and intersects with Theme 12 (considering systems change/transformation of Commons governance as an emerging area for study on Commons), and the Practitioners' Lab (innovations emerging from practice).