14 accepted tutorials across 7 themes.

This tutorial examines community adaptation, collective action, and resilience around water commoning in times of scarcity in Tubah Sub-division, Cameroon, drawing on field practice with community-based water governance in the region.

This tutorial introduces legal tools used to integrate customary laws into formal recognition frameworks, drawing on field practice with Indigenous customary territory registration and legal advocacy in Indonesia.

Community led initiatives face a persistent challenge of scale. local action can be powerful, but as it expands across communities, it can become centralized, or dependent on professional institutions. The challenge is how to create collective power without moving decision making away from communities.

We will share a structure, cadre and synchronized action model emerging from grassroots practice across rural and Indigenous landscapes in India. the model connects local volunteers, community institutions and leadership structures across village, block and district levels while keeping decision making close to communities. communities identify issues locally, organize around them and generate evidence from lived experience. When similar concerns emerge across locations, these locally rooted actions can be synchronized to create wider visibility and influence without requiring every community to act in the same way.

The tutorial explores synchronization as an alternative to conventional models of scaling based on replication and standardization. It asks how communities can remain locally autonomous while developing enough connection and coherence to influence larger systems. cadre play an important role as connectors and facilitators who strengthen relationships, institutions, evidence and learning rather than centralize decision making. Through field cases, participants will examine where distributed leadership works, where synchronization adds power, and where coordination can unintentionally become control. They will then map a collective action challenge from their own context, identifying what should remain local, what needs to be connected, and what forms of coordination are required. The central proposition is that scale can mean connecting many locally rooted actions.

Disaster researchers and practitioners have warned for years that policymakers cannot continue using the same old approaches to deal with future disasters. Today, this need for change is becoming more urgent. Disaster frameworks often focus on cleaning up damage and rebuilding what existed before. However, rebuilding the same systems may also recreate the vulnerabilities and inequalities that made people at risk in the first place. Hazards will always exist, but they do not automatically become disasters. Decisions about development, governance, and access to resources can increase or reduce their impacts. We therefore need a new vision and strategy for helping disaster-affected communities prepare for uncertainty.

This tutorial introduces strategic foresight as a practical and participatory approach to planning for the future. Participants will learn to identify emerging trends and develop different future scenarios to determine what actions are needed today. Strategic foresight does not predict exactly what will happen. Instead, it helps academics, practitioners, policymakers, and communities prepare for a range of possibilities and make better long-term decisions.

Climate change is intensifying the frequency and severity of environmental hazards, including landslides, floods, and forest fires, posing significant challenges to the governance of common-pool resources. These climate-induced disturbances require decision-support approaches that integrate ecological resilience, disaster risk, and land suitability to guide sustainable land management. This hands-on tutorial introduces participants to a spatially explicit Decision Support Tool (DST) that combines Environmental Carrying Capacity (ECC) assessment with the Agroecological Suitability Index (ASI) to generate evidence-based recommendations for land-use planning in climate-vulnerable landscapes. ECC is quantified using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) through the integration of five key environmental components: disaster hazard, erosion risk, critical habitat, ecosystem services, and ecosystem sensitivity. These indicators are subsequently combined with an Agroecological Suitability Index derived from six biophysical variables: temperature, rainfall, slope, soil type, elevation, and land cover. By overlaying ECC and ASI, participants will learn how to identify areas suitable for conservation, ecological restoration, sustainable agriculture, and risk-sensitive land development, thereby supporting more resilient governance of shared natural resources under changing climatic conditions. Designed as a 2–3-hour interactive tutorial for a maximum of 20 participants, the session combines concise conceptual lectures with practical GIS-based exercises and case-study applications. Participants will gain hands-on experience in preparing spatial datasets, conducting ECC and ASI analyses, integrating the two indices within a decision-support framework, and interpreting the results.

This tutorial introduces principles of collective action for cocreating knowledge on socio-ecological systems, drawing on trilateral Wadden Sea research between the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark.

Landscape governance requires institutions and processes that can address ecological interdependencies while enabling collaboration among diverse actors. Yet, planning and governance continue to be fragmented across sectors and administrative boundaries, limiting the effectiveness of commons conservation and restoration. The Landscape Conservation Action Planning (LCAP) approach, developed through the Foundation for Ecological Security's field experience, provides a practical framework for enabling collaborative governance at the landscape scale.

This interactive tutorial will introduce participants to the conceptual foundations and practical application of LCAP as a participatory planning and governance process. The tutorial demonstrates how ecological systems, community institutions, Multi-Actor Platforms (MAPs), and public agencies can be brought together to develop a shared vision for landscape stewardship and translate it into coordinated action.

Participants will work through the major stages of the LCAP process, including landscape delineation, stakeholder mapping, shared visioning, participatory situational analysis, prioritisation of conservation actions, institutional role clarification, and development of an integrated Landscape Conservation Action Plan. Through facilitated group exercises, case studies, participants will gain hands-on experience in applying these tools to different socio-ecological contexts.

The tutorial is designed for multiple actors including students interested in governance of commons. By the end of the session, participants will understand how participatory planning can strengthen community stewardship, improve coordination across institutions, manage trade-offs, and build adaptive governance systems for resilient landscape.

Sustainable natural resource management requires changes in both institutions and behavior to address frequent situations in which actions that benefit individuals in the short term can undermine collective well-being and long-term resource sustainability. Addressing such challenges requires changes in the knowledge, motivation, and agency of diverse actors, as well as stronger capacities for collective decision-making at community and policy levels. A key challenge is identifying approaches that can promote such changes in a cost-effective manner and at scales large enough to support widespread transformation. Experiential learning offers a promising pathway. By combining active experimentation with reflective observation, it enables participants to explore the consequences of decisions, learn from experience, and identify locally appropriate solutions to the challenges they face. Collective action games can make complex system dynamics tangible and foster dialogue among stakeholders. When complemented by structured reflection, such games can strengthen understanding of collective action challenges, encourage behavioral change, and support more inclusive resource governance.

In this methods’ lab, participants will learn about the conceptual foundations of experiential learning games and jointly explore how game-based approaches could be applied to addressing challenges in their own professional settings. Facilitators will demonstrate key steps in the co-design process.

The lab aims to inspire practitioner-researcher collaboration, build practical skills for designing and applying experiential learning approaches, and stimulate critical reflection on how games can contribute to effective, equitable, and scalable commons governance interventions.

This tutorial will provide participants with the theoretical background and practical experience needed to code written regulations using the typology and taxonomy of rules. The approach builds on the connection between the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework and the rule typology developed by Ostrom and Crawford (2005). In the IAD framework, an action situation includes participants, positions, actions, information, control, costs and benefits, and potential outcomes. The rule typology classifies rules according to the component of the action situation they directly affect: position, boundary, choice, aggregation, information, payoff, and scope rules. More recently, these seven rule types have been further differentiated into a taxonomy of approximately 100 rule subtypes, allowing for a more fine-grained analysis of institutional function (Arahuetes-de la Iglesia et al., 2026).

During the tutorial, participants will learn how to identify rule types based on the function of institutional statements and how additional grammatical components can help distinguish among rule subtypes. Participants will practice coding written regulations and discuss ambiguous or complex cases. The tutorial will conclude with examples showing how the typology and taxonomy can be applied to analyze and compare institutional arrangements in empirical research.

Commons governance outcomes rarely result from a single factor. Successful collective action, institutional resilience, or sustainable resource management may emerge through different combinations of social, institutional, and ecological conditions. Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is particularly well suited to studying this causal complexity.

This hands-on tutorial introduces participants to the logic and core steps of set-theoretic QCA using examples from commons research. Participants will learn how to move from a theoretical argument and case-based knowledge to the calibration of sets; examine necessary and sufficient conditions; construct and interpret truth tables; and identify alternative configurations associated with an outcome. Particular attention will be given to conjunctural causation, equifinality, causal asymmetry, and the interpretation of solution pathways.

Working through a small commons-governance dataset, participants will make calibration decisions, examine configurations, and discuss how substantive case knowledge should guide QCA rather than be replaced by it. We will also address common pitfalls, including poorly justified calibration, limited diversity, contradictory configurations, and overly mechanical interpretation of software output.

The tutorial is designed for researchers and practitioners with no prior QCA experience. By the end, participants should be able to assess when QCA is appropriate, understand the basic workflow, and begin designing a QCA study of commons and collective action.

Recent developments in digital scholarship, open data infrastructures, and computational techniques have altered how scholars and practitioners engage with research on the commons. Despite these advances, synthesizing large, dispersed scholarly publications remains challenging, particularly for those seeking to explore the development of the intellectual landscape in a chosen topical area. This workshop introduces bibliometric analysis as a systematic approach for examining research landscapes, identifying areas of conceptual convergence, and detecting fragmentation in Commons’ scholarship.

Using the bibliometrix package in RStudio and taking a sample objective on analyzing food systems transformation, the instructors will engage with participants to provide hands-on training on: 1) downloading metadata from global databases on scholarly publications (such as Scopus and Web of Science), 2) using R to undertake bibliometric analyses to analyze knowledge systems, and 3) developing key data-driven visuals for wider dissemination. Attention will also be given to the emerging role of generative AI in supporting coding, synthesis, and analysis, alongside the ethical and epistemic concerns that accompany its use.

The tutorial echoes the Methods Lab's emphasis on applied approaches designed for both scholars and practitioners in the Commons space. The workshop will provide a clear workflow for conducting bibliometric reviews and demonstrate how these methods can illuminate knowledge gaps, support coordinated methods training, and inform future research on traditional and emerging commons, ranging from digital communities to food systems and institutional governance.

Sometimes the best solution is to change the game. This tutorial introduces methods for understanding diversity in collective action situations and pathways for transformation to win-win solutions. Stories and models of collective action problems have played a central role in research on governing commons. Much of this has focused on the kind of social dilemma typified by the Prisoner’s Dilemma story and payoff matrix in game theory, with tensions between individual incentives and collective benefits from cooperation that can underly tragedy of the commons, free riding, public goods provision, and governance of common pool resources. However, interdependence takes many forms. Social institutions such as rules, norms, and conventions that shift the ranking of outcomes can transform situations, for example turning tragic temptations toward an inefficient outcome in a Prisoner’s Dilemma into a coordination problem of assuring trust to reach a win-win equilibrium in a Stag Hunt. Following this logic of transformation reveals a “periodic table of social situations”. This landscape of cooperation and conflict displays the diversity and fluidity present even in simple models of interdependence, including the prevalence of problems of fairness (equity/justice), anticipation, coordination, instability, and compromise. Rethinking and rewriting stories and models of collective action, including the complexities of multiple motivations, offers insights into “changing the game” to improve cooperation. Participants in this tutorial will learn, discuss, and practice using stories, models, and visualizations as methods to understand and navigate collective action in commoning. Examples will include forest, water, climate, health, and knowledge commons (themes 1, 2, 7, 8, 9 & 10).

This workshop will explore how the same case, or a set of closely related cases, could be studied through different methodological approaches. The goal is for participants to learn how methodological choices affect the questions they can ask and the research design they can develop for a case study, including data requirements, units of analysis, and the types of inference that can be made. The workshop will also consider the strengths, limitations, trade-offs, and potential complementarities of different approaches.

Sustainable natural resource management and governance requires collaboration among diverse, interdependent actors. Polycentric governance, understood as a system in which multiple autonomous authorities operate and interact across sectors and scales, has been proposed as a promising approach to address such challenges. Multi-actor platforms have the potential to strengthen coordination among actors and support polycentric governance. At the same time, they are often shaped by explicit and implicit power dynamics that influence participation and outcomes. Addressing social dynamics that participants themselves may not fully recognize remains a significant challenge.

Within the CGIAR Multifunctional Landscapes Science Program, we seek to address this challenge by integrating organizational constellations into a multi-actor planning process to enhance landscape multifunctionality. Organizational constellations are an embodied practice that bridges the articulation of transition pathways with reflection on deeper social dynamics. The approach complements methods such as visioning and actor mapping by accessing tacit, relational, and emotional dimensions of the system. It supports both sense-making and relationship-building, grounding analytical planning in a more embodied understanding of multi-actor dynamics. In doing so, it creates space for empathy, reflection, and creativity in identifying pathways for transformation.

In this practitioner lab, participants will be introduced to the conceptual foundations of organizational constellations and will have the opportunity to experience the method through a commons governance case contributed by participants.