53 accepted workshops across 13 themes.

Conservation policies increasingly use payments, fines, contracts, protected-area rules, and other governance interventions to influence resource-use behaviour. Yet these interventions do not enter an institutional or social vacuum. Their effects depend on how they interact with existing values, beliefs, norms, relationships, authority structures, and local practices of collective resource management.

This interactive workshop asks how conservation interventions are interpreted in context, when they support stewardship and collective action, and when they generate resistance, unintended effects, or institutional tensions. We will briefly introduce an emerging analytical framework that distinguishes intervention characteristics (such as type, duration, conditionality, and monitoring) from implementation processes such as consultation, decision-making, and transparency, and links these to behavioural and institutional responses.

The main purpose of the session is to challenge, extend, and refine this framework through the experience of participants. We particularly welcome practitioners, empirical researchers working across diverse conservation and commons settings, and scholars contributing theoretical or conceptual perspectives from economics, psychology, political science, conservation social science, and institutional analysis. Small-group discussion around concrete cases will be used to identify missing mechanisms, relevant contextual conditions, boundary conditions, and implications for research design and practice.

The workshop aims to generate a broader and more practically grounded understanding of when conservation interventions complement rather than displace locally grounded institutions and collective action.

Forests and pastures are living commons that sustain livelihoods, ecological security, cultural identities and social relations across the high mountains of the Global South. Indigenous and local communities have developed intergenerational knowledge, customary institutions and collective practices for governing these resources. Yet state and corporate enclosures, conservation regimes, infrastructure expansion, commercialisation, climate change and changing tenure arrangements are transforming mountain commons, often undermining local rights and livelihood security while generating new forms of resistance and collective action.

This workshop explores how communities negotiate these transformations and create new pathways for commoning. It welcomes comparative contributions from the Himalaya, Andes, African highlands, Central Asian mountains and other high-mountain regions, examining the intersections of forest governance, livelihoods, customary and formal tenure, gender, conservation, climate change and collective action. Beyond documenting the loss of commons, the workshop seeks to illuminate how communities defend, renew, adapt and expand commoning under contemporary pressures. Particular attention is invited to customary tenure, Indigenous and local knowledge, women-led collective action, community-based conservation, institutional innovation and struggles for recognition and resource justice.

By bringing diverse mountain experiences into dialogue, the workshop will identify shared challenges and context-specific pathways towards equitable tenure, resilient livelihoods and locally legitimate commons governance, while fostering knowledge exchange among researchers, practitioners and Indigenous and local knowledge holders.

The most effective approach for forest sustainability is to entrust their management to Indigenous Peoples by combining their ancestral knowledge with modern science.

The role of traditional knowledge includes respectful management: Indigenous Peoples use rotation techniques and measured harvesting that protect trees and animals; Living biodiversity maps: their knowledge of plants and water cycles allows them to quickly spot ecological threats. Controlled burns: they carry out guided burns to prevent massive forest fires and nourish the soil. The pillars of a sustainable approach are the recognition of rights, i.e. giving local communities legal ownership of their ancestral lands stops illegal deforestation. Co-management by creating alliances between governments, scientists, and Indigenous Peoples to jointly decide the protection rules; Economic promotion, i.e. supporting the fair trade of forest products (honey, fruits, oils) harvested without destroying the trees. Current challenges are: industrial pressures: mining and intensive farming destroy natural habitats; lack of laws: many countries still ignore Indigenous land rights; climate change: droughts and storms threaten ecosystems and traditions; financial problems related to sustainable forest management and the promotion of Indigenous knowledge are a major obstacle, often marked by a severe lack of resources and economic inequalities.

Highland regions hold strategic ecological value, serving as water towers, biodiversity hotspots, and providers of ecosystem services, including disaster prevention and mitigation. This role is especially significant in Java, which covers only 6% of Indonesia's total land area but is home to 60% of the nation's population. On this most densely populated and urbanized island, highland regions face severe threats. As an institution specializing in agriculture and forestry based in Java, IPB University must be part of the solution. Since the 2000s, IPB University has implemented this approach in two highland locations in Java—the Dieng Mountains and the Puncak Bogor area—by going beyond mere physical interventions to focus on organizing local communities. Both areas have their own uniqueness: the Dieng area is one of the largest remaining natural forests in Central Java and serves as an important biodiversity hotspot on Java, while the Puncak area provides vital ecosystem services to the nation’s capital. In both locations, one government-offered solution is the social forestry program, which, as stated in the policy, encourages community involvement in protecting those forested areas. The results of implementing this policy have varied. In the Puncak region case, it has improved the well-being of local residents and restored the forest, with Cibulao coffee as its primary commodity. Other cases have yielded less-than-expected results, for example, when land control has shifted to other entities. This workshop is organized to explore good practices in social forestry policies in Java’s highland regions, using the Cibulao case as a case-based learning example, and to analyze the contemporary challenges it currently faces as a commons.

The environmental sector operates at the intersection of the long timescales of ecosystem processes and the short timescales of human management systems. While environmental education prepares professionals to navigate these complex processes, they also prepare them for a changing job market. This is where shifting baseline syndrome (SBS) comes in. SBS refers to successive generations of professionals departing from the state of the environment at the beginning of their careers, meaning that with every new generation, baselines decline. Applying the concept of SBS to capacity development is necessary because capacity development is one way in which shifting baselines are institutionalized. Influenced by societal trends toward practicality and market applicability, capacity development has merely become a background condition for project implementation, resulting in environmental professionals who are technically sophisticated but institutionally and ecologically poorly anchored in landscape realities.

We invite participants to explore landscape capacities and propose ways to develop these differently. We will analyze how modern capacity development models and institutionally embedded education curricula accept and repeat depleted ecosystems as normative standard, leading to SBS. We will discuss how capacity development not only contributes to SBS but also to recalibration through better integration of ecological, historical, and geographic literacy and better contextualized knowledge transfer. We will share examples of innovative curriculum design that not only teach the management of a landscape as it exists but also teach the discovery of a landscape that is ecologically and socially desirable through interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and place-based learning.

Water follows geology and topography; governance follows property and administrative boundaries. This mismatch creates a persistent commons challenge in India’s Northern Western Ghats, where predominantly Indigenous and smallholder communities depend on highly seasonal rainfall and interconnected surface and groundwater systems.

Landscape restoration increasingly needs to follow hydrological systems—ridges, slopes, streams, recharge zones and aquifers—rather than individual assets. Yet decisions about water remain organised around farms, villages, ownership and government jurisdictions. Water recharged on one farmer’s land may benefit wells elsewhere; upstream land and water management affects downstream users; and aquifers connect households and villages that may have no institution through which to make collective decisions. Those protecting recharge areas or contributing labour may not be those receiving the greatest benefit.

Drawing on Raah Foundation’s field experience with community-led water security, this Case Clinic brings a live, unresolved question to participants: how should a water commons be governed when its ecological boundaries do not correspond to its social, ownership or administrative boundaries?

Participants will examine representation, contribution, benefit-sharing, groundwater access, upstream–downstream responsibilities and institutional scale, and collaboratively explore governance arrangements that can follow water across a landscape.

The case raises a wider commons question: if the resource has no fixed boundary, where should the institution begin and end?

The Sama-Bajau are a formerly nomadic-group inhabiting coastal areas and small islands in Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, they live across 14 provinces and are settled in five of the country's seven marine national parks. They have a profound socio-ecological connection to their maritime territory through traditional-ecological-knowledge that has been cultivated over centuries. Their livelihoods also depend heavily on marine and island resources. However, within mainstream marine conservation approaches, the Sama-Bajau are still excluded from the management and governance of marine conservation areas. Addressing this gap requires strengthening the socio-cultural identity, agency, and autonomous practices of the Sama-Bajau in Indonesia. To address this issue, we are implementing a co-production of knowledge (CPK) process to ensure that the traditional-ecological-knowledge of Sama-Bajau is recognized, valued, integrated, and protected in conservation efforts. As a collaborative effort between the Wildlife Conservation Society, scholars, and the Sama-Bajau activists, this workshop will unpack the situated marine commons and the CPK process with Sama-Bajau in South Sulawesi, West Nusa Tenggara, and North Sulawesi. Using a case-based learning approach and a decolonial methodology, participants will critically examine how CPK has been applied across these three provinces, exploring the challenges, lessons learned, and enabling factors that have supported the process. Through facilitated discussions and case analysis, participants will reflect on how this approach can be adapted to their own organizational contexts. This workshop is designed for conservation practitioners, NGO staff, researchers, donors, and government agencies that are interested in inclusive conservation.

This project proposes a large, site-based public mural developed collaboratively with communities in Makassar, South Sulawesi, exploring marine, coastal, island and freshwater ecosystems as interconnected commons. Makassar sits at a meeting point of rivers, coastline, islands and sea, where generations of communities have developed intimate ways of understanding and inhabiting these waters. The mural will begin not with an image, but with listening. Through conversations, walks, drawing, participatory mapping and storytelling, community members will share what they know and remember about the waters around them: tides and currents, fishing grounds, seasonal changes, rivers and rainfall, mangroves and reefs, species and habitats, journeys between islands, ancestral stories, beliefs and experiences of ecological change. A central part of the process will be gathering the words and voices of participants. Fragments of conversations, local expressions, memories, beliefs and poetic descriptions will be transformed collaboratively into a body of text integral to the mural. Rather than functioning as captions, these words will inhabit the image itself—woven through landscapes, species and currents, accumulating into a collective totem: a poetic inscription of how a community understands and belongs to its living environment. The mural will bring freshwater, river, coastal and marine worlds into one fluid ecology, reflecting water as a continuous system through which people, species, stories and knowledge move. It asks what it means to understand water as a commons, not simply as a resource, but as a living archive held through collective memory and practice. The finished work will become a public monument to these relationships: a place where many voices and ways of knowing coexist.

Coastal communities face mounting pressures from climate change, land degradation, biodiversity loss, and strained food systems—while ecosystems like mangroves gain growing recognition for their carbon-storing potential. Mangrove blue carbon (MBC) projects aim to turn this potential into restoration incentives. However, these incentives bring technical complexity, new governance demands, and target the commodification of carbon storage, creating significant capacity challenges for the systems, organizations, and individuals managing coastal landscapes.

This workshop builds on our active engagement in MBC capacity development and aims to strengthen instruments for assessing stakeholder needs. Through guided discussions, mapping, brainstorming, clustering, and ranking exercises, participants will examine technical, empowering, and enabling capacities across the MBC value chain—including for MRV, project design, and finance, alongside governance capacities like FPIC and benefit sharing.

The workshop aims to produce a refined, empirically grounded framework for assessing capacity needs across the MBC chain, identifying gaps in technical, governance, and empowerment capacities needed for equitable outcomes. This framework will serve as a practical diagnostic tool for targeting capacity-building efforts locally, nationally, or regionally. For project developers, it will clarify the competencies and institutional arrangements needed to meet technical and social standards from the start, reducing risks of redesign or community pushback. For financiers, it will provide clearer criteria for assessing the readiness and risk of blue carbon investments, helping distinguish projects capable of equitable, durable outcomes from those at risk of governance or implementation failure.

Climate breakdown is more than an ecological crisis; it is also a crisis of relationships, governance, humanity, and power. This workshop will explore mangroves as living commons and spaces where communities respond to climate breakdown from the bottom up, in line with theme 2, 8 and 6 of the Conference.

Rather than framing mangroves primarily as carbon sinks, coastal infrastructure, or “nature-based solutions,” we approach them as lived territories, sources of livelihood and culture, and landscapes shaped by histories of collective care, struggle, and governance. Mangroves are contested spaces. Who gets to define them—as resources, carbon sinks, conservation areas, livelihoods, territories, or commons? These framings carry different forms of power, governance, and value in the ecosystem.

The workshop will explore the commonalities and differences in community-led responses, without seeking a one-size-fits-all approach. We will also examine when external actors—including governments, NGOs, researchers and funders—can strengthen or unintentionally undermine community agency, particularly as climate finance, blue carbon, and nature-based solutions bring new actors, resources, and values into mangrove territories.

Rather than starting with externally defined solutions, we begin with the practices, relationships, and institutions through which people collectively sustain mangrove landscapes. What forms of commoning already exist? How are access, care, rights, responsibilities, and decisions negotiated? What enables or constrains collective action?

At its heart, the workshop asks: What does bottom-up climate action look like when we start from relationships, place, and commons—and how can we recognize, protect, and strengthen the agency already in place?

Indonesia’s archipelagic character has profoundly shaped ways of thinking, knowing, and living. Situated within the Ring of Fire, its societies live among islands, volcanoes, seas, infrastructures, and communities where uncertainty and risk are part of everyday life. Within such complexity, transdisciplinarity is not simply an academic approach; its principles are already embedded in collective practices of knowledge-making, care, negotiation, and survival.

This 90-minute participatory workshop explores “Archipelogics”—an archipelagic logic of relationality—as a foundation for knowledge co-production across disciplinary boundaries and social hierarchies. It approaches knowledge as a commons: not simply a resource held in common, but something continually produced and transformed through commoning—practices of sharing, negotiating, caring, contesting, and taking responsibility for worlds held in relation. Co-production may therefore emerge through research and writing, songs and films, exhibitions, environmental action, disaster-risk practices, and other collective experiments.

The workshop builds upon a collaborative process initiated in April 2026 by activists, scholars, artists, disaster practitioners, and literacy workers through the University of Bonn, BRIN, and Yayasan Pasir Putih. After a year of experimentation, participants will revisit the Archipelogics Manifesto and ask: What worked, and what fell short? What remains unrealized? Have power relations shifted? Who can access and shape the commons? How have human and more-than-human actors participated in knowledge-making? What happens when interpretations diverge?

Through multimodal and creative interactions, participants will critically examine relationality and commoning as practical ways of living with coastal risk and uncertainty. Rather than seeking consensus, the workshop creates space for disagreement, reflection, and experimentation, asking what new possibilities emerge when different knowledges, practices, beings, and worlds encounter one another. Every participant is a resource person. Participation is limited to 30 people.

This workshop examines local initiatives and gender mainstreaming in environmental governance challenges in the Lake Niassa Partial Reserve of Mozambique, bringing together practitioners working on community-based conservation and gender-inclusive natural resource management in the region.

This workshop examines mechanisms for formalising the role of fishing communities in reef and fisheries management across the Indo-Pacific region, comparing governance approaches and examining the relationship between state capacity and community self-organisation in fisheries governance.

Nature-based solutions (NbS) have become a key strategy for addressing urban challenges such as climate adaptation, biodiversity loss, and disaster risk reduction. However, NbS are often framed as technical or ecological interventions, with limited attention to the governance systems that sustain them. In rapidly urbanizing regions of Asia and the Global South, many NbS—including community gardens, urban wetlands, rivers, parks, mangroves, and other shared green and blue spaces—function as urban commons, where communities collectively manage natural resources to support environmental quality, livelihoods, and social well-being. Yet the role of commons governance in shaping the effectiveness, equity, and long-term sustainability of NbS remains underexplored. This interactive workshop explores urban commons as governance systems for NbS through the lenses of commons theory, community stewardship, and collaborative governance. It highlights how collective action, informal institutions, and locally grounded commoning practices contribute to resilient and inclusive cities. Particular attention will be given to experiences from Southeast Asia and the broader Global South, where community-led governance offers alternative perspectives that remain underrepresented in dominant NbS frameworks. Through short presentations, facilitated discussions, and collaborative mapping exercises, participants will identify research gaps, compare case studies, and co-develop a research agenda linking urban commons and NbS. The workshop aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue among researchers, practitioners, planners, community organizations, and artists working on urban sustainability, commons governance, and climate resilience.

For centuries, food has served us more than a commodity. It embodies cultural identities, ecological relationships, livelihoods, histories, and rights. Yet discussions of food commons often focus on shared resources such as land, water, seeds, or fisheries, while paying less attention to the knowledge that enables food systems to persist and evolve. This workshop uses recipes as an entry point for exploring food as a commons. Recipes are living repositories of knowledge through which communities transmit practices, values, memories, and relationships across generations and geographies. They are more than lists of ingredients and instructions.

As recipes travel across time and space, adapting to new ingredients and methods, they raise difficult questions: Who owns a recipe? When does sharing become stealing? When does adaptation become appropriate? Does sharing sustain traditions or does it commodify or erase them? Is flavour a commons, a commodity, or both? How do commercially owned social-media platforms support co-learning without extracting value from communities and creators? In this workshop, we will explore the tensions between innovation and attribution, market value and cultural heritage, and global circulation and knowledge preservation. This workshop uses the World Café method, with four rotating stations on economic, cultural, ecological, and rights-based values, to (1) surface whose knowledge and interests dominate recipe narrative privileges and (2) develop alternatives centred on relationships, reciprocity and care. The workshop will conclude by synthesising these discussions into a vision map, a practical tool for examining recipe sharing through the multiple values of food commons and informing future research, policy, and governance.

Food access policy is frequently designed on a deficit model, which assumes an absence of provisioning capacity and responds by delivering food as a subsidised commodity. This assumption warrants examination. Four participatory workshops conducted in Mexico documented a substantial range of everyday food commoning practices, together with participants' accounts of the motivations sustaining them. These practices remain largely invisible to conventional food system metrics. Workshop participants recorded these practices in their own handwriting on a textile, which will be brought to the congress. The medium constitutes a methodological argument concerning what is admitted as evidence, and enables the participation of those not present without their being represented by others.

The session proceeds in three stages. Attendees first engage with the textile, identifying practices that correspond to their own contexts and those without local equivalent. Small groups then address the central question: what conditions must a Universal Food Access scheme satisfy in order to recognise and strengthen existing commoning practices, and under what conditions does such a scheme erode them? A plenary synthesis follows.

The workshop produces a set of design criteria distinguishing enabling from corrosive institutional conditions, intended as a direct contribution to the theme's draft policy proposal. These criteria will be inscribed on a second textile, which will travel from the congress to a partner site in Southeast Asia. Discussions regarding regional co-facilitation are underway.

Whilst phrases such as Indigenous stewardship vaguely encapsulate the extent of cultural and epistemic shift needed to manage 'commons', the transformation needed for planetary justice is much more profound. A true and meaningful conception of just futures requires a constructive recognition of Indigenous relationships with land and environment. Such recognition has to be both epistemic and material, fully agitating the established modes of reciprocal engagement with the multispecies world. Further, it also requires breaking down the structures that reify colonialism and capitalism by eliding and erasing indigeneity. In doing so, new forms of world-building endeavours can offer ways to protect what we cherish and forge new ways of thinking that fully give themselves up to non-extractive, expansive and liberating formulation of everyday living. In this workshop, we invite scholars and practitioners from Indonesia, India, and Australia to illuminate the conversation around indigeneity and decoloniality in achieving effective governance of commons. The workshop aims to ground the conversation in practice, i.e., examples and case studies of Indigenous rangers and organisations that have reclaimed and recalibrated governance of common environmental heritage. With this foundation, the workshop also invites the participants to push the boundaries of theorisation to understand what these living examples mean to articulating environmental and climate justice. In addition, participants are invited to deliberate on how to engage state and non-state actors to achieve more than provisional control over resources by broadening the epistemic limits of sovereignty, self-determination, and decolonial environmental governance.

The rampant capitalism that has taken hold of the lives of indigenous women in rural Indonesia, the Grassroots Women’s Network has turned inwards to its own community, rethinking what sort of village they envisage; what sort of community they imagine living on this earth; and whether we can bring about change without taking power. These reflective questions ultimately led the Akar Global Initiative and the Grassroots Women’s Network to an idea we call ‘Rebuilding the Commons’; that is, a constellation of care-based practices in everyday life aimed at rebuilding the strength of the communities and villages they dream of.

The 2024 Women’s Sharing Conference and the 2026 International Indigenous Women’s Conference, facilitated by Akar, identified a common pattern: land grabs by the state and corporations, in the name of development or war, sever women’s ties to the land and destroy their means of subsistence. Women are then forced into precarious forms of social reproductive labour such as debt, domestic work, plantation labour, mining and even ultra-micro work such as online trading, all of which are far away from their rural living spaces and culture. As a result, women not only lose their means of subsistence, but also their capabilities to achieve well-being.

Starting from this situation, we finally come up with the concept of ‘Rebuilding The Common’, which comprises four aspects which are : Commoning Land, Commoning Care, Commoning Culture, and Commoning Movement which we propose to discuss at the workshop. Participants respond to short provocations based on their own research and practice, followed by facilitated discussion, aiming to mobilise further thinking and radical research questions as stated by the Grassroots Women’s Network above.

This workshop positions academia as a critical catalyst in the decolonization of the commons, highlighting how universities can support, amplify, and innovate around Indigenous food practices. Drawing from the lived experiences of Amealco de Bonfil, an Otomí territory in central Mexico, we explore how peasant traditions, women’s leadership, and community rituals sustain food as a commons. Local initiatives such as the Maize and Milpa Fair, Women’s Encounters, and community markets demonstrate how communities organize around food commons, resisting commodification while regenerating cultural and ecological resilience. At the heart of these practices lies a strong community impulse: the drive to organize around food as a shared resource, weaving together rituals, seasonal consumption, and collective cooperation. Academia plays a key role in amplifying this impulse by documenting practices, creating spaces for dialogue, and fostering social innovations that reconnect communities with ancestral knowledge and agroecological innovation. Through applied pedagogy, collaborative research, and participatory methodologies, universities help re-ground Indigenous practices in contemporary contexts, bridging local experiences with global debates on food governance and commons.

The workshop invites participants into an interactive dialogue combining collective memory exercises, case-based learning, and collaborative design. Together, we will map diverse understandings of “the commons,” and co-design strategies to strengthen food commons in participants’ own contexts. Expected outcomes include a collective map of decolonial practices, replicable strategies for food commons governance, and new collaborations between academia and communities.

The commons are more important than ever in the current context of environmental, climate, and democratic crises, yet longstanding and entrenched inequalities shape commons management and the prospects for just and emancipatory forms of commoning. This workshop builds on several decades of scholarship on power, inequality, and justice, aiming to make a substantive contribution to scholarship on decolonizing the commons and commons studies. We invite scholars, practitioners, activists, and community members to interrogate and articulate how power imbalances and colonial inequalities are produced, reproduced, and contested within commons institutions and scholarship.

Addressing the conference theme of resilience, resistance, and collective action, we ask: How do gender, class, ethnicity, and Indigeneity shape who counts as a commoner and who gets to govern the commons? When bottom-up commoning meets state and market institutions, whose vision of the commons prevails? To what extent can emancipatory forms of commoning challenge entrenched structures of power and inequalities?

We are looking for submissions to ensure a diversity of analytical and methodological approaches, including feminist commoning, decolonial relationality, and critical epistemologies, with special attention to the contemporary challenges related to Knowledge commons, technology, and artificial intelligence that affect every other type of commons. The workshop seeks to learn from practitioners' experiences and support early-career researchers looking to carve out a unique niche for making substantive scholarly contributions. This hybrid workshop will draw on a collaboratively developed framework, which we will use as a roadmap for collaborative research and solidarity.

Polycentric governance is widely recommended as a solution to commons problems, but it is not a panacea, and we lack empirical evidence about what types of polycentric arrangements suit particular collective action problems under particular conditions. One reason is that the empirical literature consists largely of single cases observed at a single point in time, making comparison and cumulation nearly impossible. This workshop convenes researchers with well-developed, longitudinal cases of institutional change in polycentric settings, and takes a concrete step toward comparative work and a planned special issue. It builds on the Context-Operations-Outcomes-Feedbacks (COOFs) framework (Baldwin et al. 2024) and on a planned webinar series (Oct 26 - May 27) in which participants develop hypotheses to be examined in the IASC workshop. We expect the webinar series and workshop to lead to a a joint paper and special issue focused on the COOFs framework and long-term institutional and social-ecological change. Participation will be by open call: interested authors will submit a short summary of their empirical case along common COOF dimensions. Workshop organizers will select 5 – 15 participants based on the suitability of their cases, the stages of development of their case analyses, their interest in using the COOF framework, and their willingness to participate the webinar series leading up to the IASC 2027 conference. During the workshop, participants will test and refine hypotheses developed in the webinar based on individual or paired longitudinal cases. We will also discuss the special issue. Participants will leave with sharpened testable propositions, a common conceptual approach, and an opportunity to participate in a special issue. We welcome cases from all regions.

Mountain commons—including forests, pastures, water sources, agricultural landscapes and rangelands—are vital to livelihoods, ecological security and cultural life across the Global South. Climate change is intensifying droughts, floods, landslides, wildfires, glacier and snow changes, and other hazards, placing growing pressure on these commons and the institutions that govern them. Insecure tenure, resource enclosure, development pressures and social inequalities further compound these risks.

Yet mountain communities are not merely vulnerable to these transformations. Indigenous and local communities draw on intergenerational knowledge, customary institutions, social networks, and collective action to anticipate risks, adapt to environmental change, and recover from disasters. In many contexts, communities are also innovating and reshaping resource governance in response to rapidly changing socio-ecological conditions.

This workshop invites comparative contributions from the Himalaya, Andes, African highlands, Central Asian mountains and other high-mountain regions of the Global South. It explores how climate change and disasters affect commons and collective institutions, and how community-based action can strengthen climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction and resilience. Contributions may address Indigenous and local knowledge, customary institutions, gender, ecosystem-based adaptation, tenure security, institutional innovation and transformative governance.

Moving beyond vulnerability-centred narratives, the workshop seeks to highlight how mountain communities protect, adapt and reconfigure commons under uncertainty, and to identify locally grounded, equitable and inclusive pathways towards resilience.

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of environmental hazards while exposing the limitations of fragmented approaches to resilience building. Strengthening resilience requires not only technological innovation but also inclusive spaces where knowledge, experiences, and capacities are collectively created and shared. International educational initiatives have the potential to function as knowledge commons by connecting researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and communities across disciplinary and geographical boundaries. This interactive workshop introduces the Climate Resilience Academy (CRA), coordinated by the Centre for Climate Risk and Opportunity Management in Southeast Asia and the Pacific (CCROM-SEAP), as a case study to explore how collaborative learning platforms can foster collective action for climate resilience. International CRA can serve as "knowledge commons" by creating spaces where participants co-produce knowledge, exchange experiences, and develop enduring collaborative networks. Rather than presenting a single educational model, the workshop invites participants to critically reflect on the principles, governance, and partnerships that enable knowledge commons to emerge and endure. Participants will engage in facilitated discussions and collaborative design activities to identify barriers to equitable climate resilience education, share successful practices from different regions, and co-develop principles for designing international summer schools that promote transdisciplinary learning, stakeholder engagement, and long-term collaboration. The workshop will also examine how educational networks can strengthen adaptive capacity, support locally grounded responses to climate risks, and contribute to resilient communities.

Farmers in Batulapisi Dalam, Malino, face a shifting planting season that triggers landslides, land subsidence, and crop failures, as their knowledge of the harvest period (February-June) no longer aligns with climate realities due to prolonged rainy seasons. This pressure is compounded by the conversion of productive land into villas and tourism facilities, weakening the soil's hydrological function; since 2019, 32 cases of farmer criminalization linked to land conflicts have been recorded. Farmers' adaptive knowledge remains individual and empirical, lacking a village forum to consolidate it into collective strategy. This 90-minute workshop unfolds in three stages. It opens with a 20-minute case presentation of how Membasa built a village-level forum with Malino's farmers, through a climate field school, financial literacy training, and an informal MoU with farmers' organization PPSS Malino, framed as a bottom-up institutionalization process. A 15-minute dialogue then situates this process alongside the conference's field excursion sites: Rammang-Rammang's operating collective ecotourism governance and the Kajang Indigenous Community's state-recognized customary land rights, as further stages along the trajectory Malino's forum is still building. Participants spend 25 minutes mapping constitutionality's elements, local recognition, participatory process, integration with existing institutions, external catalysts, and higher-level recognition, onto their own contexts, closing with a 15-minute plenary across Global South cases. Membasa's three activities mirror constitutionality's stages. The Climate Field School as emic recognition (vs. Rammang-Rammang), the PPSS Malino forum-MoU as integration with existing institutions and external catalysis (vs. Kajang's formal recognition). This session addresses Theme 8 (Constitutionality) as its primary focus, explicitly linking to Theme 7 (Commons at risk) through the climate-driven agrarian pressures that necessitate this institutionalization process,

The governance of common-pool resources is increasingly understood as a process of institutional negotiation rather than simply the application of externally prescribed rules. Rangelands, wetlands, forest, communal lands and water systems are governed through the interplay among customary authorities, state institutions, resource users, community organizations and private actors. In several contexts, these institutional arrangements are neither totally formal nor absolutely customary; instead, their evolution has been by processes of institutional bricolage, negotiation and adaptation. Current studies highlight that governance often emerges from the mix of different institutional arrangements, knowledge systems and actors and not from a single institutional authority. This workshop proposes constitutionality as an important lens for understanding these processes. Constitutionality is conceptualized here not narrowly as formal constitutional law, but as the continuous process through which people establish, negotiate and legitimize rules concerning membership, rights, responsibilities, authority and collective decision-making. As such, communities are not merely implementing institutions configured by governments or development agencies. They are also institutional creators whose collective day to day practices can create new rules, organizational arrangements and forms of authority. This perspective is relevant in knowing how bottom-up institution building can change social interactions, produce new forms of collective identity, and strengthen the organizational capacity of commoners. These set of arrangements may later on interact with formal state institutions, producing hybrid institutional configurations. This orientation is especially pertinent to the commons.

Ecological restoration is often treated as a technical challenge: restore vegetation, conserve soil, recharge water and improve biodiversity. But a harder question begins when restoration succeeds: who governs the commons afterwards?

Across the Northern Western Ghats of India, Raah Foundation works with rural and Indigenous communities to restore degraded forests, Community Forest Rights (CFR) lands and village commons alongside water security and livelihood interventions on adjoining private lands. Our experience suggests that ecological restoration can endure only when it is accompanied by the restoration of institutions.

This workshop will use field cases from the Western Ghats to examine how communities can craft locally legitimate rules for governing restored commons: Who decides what can be harvested, where and when? How are grazing, fire, water, invasive species and competing livelihood needs managed? Who bears the costs of stewardship and who receives the benefits? How can women and historically marginalised households exercise meaningful voice? And what happens when an NGO or external funder exits?

The workshop will move beyond presenting a “successful model.” Participants will work with real governance dilemmas from different types of commons and collectively examine the institutional conditions that enable communities to move from beneficiaries of restoration to custodians of landscapes.

We invite practitioners, researchers and community representatives to compare experiences across geographies and explore a central proposition: restoring a commons is not complete when the ecology recovers; it is complete when communities have institutions capable of governing that recovery without continued external dependence.

After decades of investment to address food insecurity in Africa, governance and management of irrigation systems continue to experience sustainability challenges. This workshop will explore how artificial intelligence (AI) tools might be co-designed and adapted with agricultural communities for training purposes and development of an integrative knowledge base while assuring community data sovereignty. We propose that with appropriate caution and care, advances in artificial intelligence could provide useful tools for farming communities to strengthen their local and inclusive governance and connect local knowledge with scientific and technical expertise to improve irrigation systems and food security. A key objective and challenge is to ensure that AI-related tools and local knowledge remain under community control. We aim to bring together researchers, practitioners and community representatives with interests in water commons governance, AI, and participatory approaches in the African context. Workshop activities will include collaborative research design approaches and case-based learning. The workshop will provide a valuable opportunity for collaboration, knowledge sharing, and planning for practical applications. We recognize that there are a number of challenges to overcome, thus face-to-face collaboration at this early stage will help to foster trust, mutual understanding, and open intellectual exchange that are integral to effective partnerships. Moreover, the process will build on lessons from existing farmer-led irrigation projects and examples that manifest Ostrom’s design principles found in long-enduring common-pool resource regimes.

"Mambang Kuneng" is known among the Orang Laut of the Riau Islands as a sea spirit who teaches respect for the sea, the land, and more-than-human beings. This reverence permeates everyday life, shaping reciprocal relationships with coastal environments through stories, rituals, navigation, and shared responsibilities. These practices reveal the sea not simply as a resource, but as a living commons sustained through collective memory, care, and intergenerational knowledge. The film emerged from a collaborative research journey bringing together an artist, social scientists, Orang Laut knowledge holders, and a local journalist. Built through shared meals, conversations, field journeys, and a co-led listening and underwater recording workshop, the process itself was an act of commoning. Weaving facts, myths, lived experiences, and emotions, the film explores forms of knowledge that cannot be fully captured through academic writing alone. It follows Orang Laut communities to traditional maritime grounds increasingly fragmented by mining and industrial expansion, to households maintaining everyday relationships with the sea despite mounting pressures, and into underwater sonic environments where industrial infrastructures reshape the acoustic commons. Rather than presenting Indigenous knowledge as a disappearing archive, the film foregrounds living, adaptive ways of knowing that continue to guide navigation, coexistence with dangerous creatures, and collective life across shifting seascapes. Mambang Kuneng, together with stories of crocodiles and other more-than-human beings, embodies ethical relationships that sustain the maritime commons.

Effective ecosystem stewardship depends on sustained collaboration among diverse actors, including Indigenous peoples, collectives, civil society, organizations, researchers, and state agents. Drawing on political ecology, critical geographies and multispecies ethnography, this workshop will embrace Anna Tsing’s idea of a patchwork Anthropocene, Arturo Escobar’s pluriversal worlds, Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges and tentacular entanglements, and Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for commons governance. We will compare and co-create with case studies across Asia, the Pacific, and beyond, which model well relational ontologies that recognize co-constituted ecologies and non-human agency.

First, facilitators will share their interventions or fieldwork which engage diverse stakeholders and sympatric species, including wildlife, plants, and other more-than-human beings. Shifts toward Indigenous and commons authority may integrate traditional ecological knowledge, land rights, resistance against colonial dispossession or green extractivism, and strategies for climate adaptation and/or biocultural conservation. We will foreground the political and ecological trade-offs in developing and urbanizing areas, analyzing distributions of power and risk.

In the second half, participants will co-design by contributing images, poems, artistic work, and stories about their homelands, communities, and personally meaningful places. Our digital atlas will map connections across our global biosphere as a counter-cartography of care. This co-created piece, incorporating art, storytelling, and spatial representation, will be made publicly available as an open-access counter-map and pedagogical resource to further educate, mobilize, and inspire action to care for our common home.

What does it mean to hold the deep-sea in common—a space most of us will never see, yet on which planetary life depends? Designated under UN Convention on the Law of the Seas as the “common heritage of mankind,” the ocean floor is being readied for enclosure and extraction. Polymetallic nodules (with manganese, nickel, copper, and cobalt), in the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion–Clipperton Zone, are eyed as feedstock for car batteries and digital devices. Deep-sea mining poses not only a governance problem but a question of imagination: who gets to narrate the deep?

This workshop responds through play. Participants join Abyssal Abundance, a cooperative boardgame in which human players forge multi-species, beyond-human relations with mermaids, goddesses of the sea, and other deep-sea creatures, against “Mining Oceanic Resources International (MORI)”. MORI represents colonial extractivist logic, which runs counter to spiritual beliefs of the ocean as sacred and as the mother of all life. The game rehearses collective action across species lines, cultivates care and repair, encourages reconnection with nature, and explores mythwork and spirituality as resistance.

We approach game-play as a prefigurative practice to commoning. The session opens with a 10-min framing of the game’s eco-feminist and decolonial premise and story-world, followed by collaborative gameplay (40 min). The second half invites participants to reflect on the experience and collectively narrate imaginaries of a deep-sea commons—asking, ultimately, what art and design can do to imagine, defend, and enact the commons before enclosure forecloses them. Abyssal Abundance is part of Beyond the Shore, an inter-Asian oceanic artistic research and performance project from artist collective If Time’s Limited (Hong Kong).

This workshop is an effort to explore and understand the narratives or issues present within our urban space. Through contrast—a slow pace amidst a fast-paced city—we can heighten our senses, collect visual elements, and metaphorize events or issues using walking as an art form. In doing so, we generate reflections, contemplations, thoughts, and feelings, or even create artwork.

Keywords: site-specific exploration, artistic sensory, local knowledge, personal production, narrative mapping

The physical environment of a city reflects the urban reality behind the progress brought by modernity. Every corner of its space carries its own local expression. Modernity offers both advantages and a dynamic environment, where existence coexists with vulnerability. Each individual interprets this reality differently. Alongside views that rely solely on logic, why not blend them with perspectives rooted in subjective feelings—each carrying its own unique viewpoint? Through an art walk, we can observe through our own respective truths.

By walking together through a shared space, we exchange layers of thoughts and feelings. What might seem insignificant to you could be deeply meaningful to someone else, and vice versa. At the same time, our resilience to our environment is tested as we resist the distractions shaped by modern habits—namely, saying "woah" without asking "why" to whatever we encounter.

The expectation for this workshop is for 5–10 participants to engage in peer-to-peer learning through hands-on practice around environmental issues, ecosystems, and culture. This is achieved through artistic experimentation and interpersonal dialogue, or even by creating works based on surrounding local issues and narratives.

The Voyager Golden Record is a phonograph record aboard NASA’s Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977 with sounds, images, music and media curated to communicate something of life on Earth to unknown others. As sensory probe and transcultural living archive, the ongoing journey of the Voyager probes opens questions of material culture and how meaning-making lives across radical difference, emphasising the importance of listening, imagination and openness when no common language can be assumed.

Discovery research asks how science and society may respond to the discovery of life or technologies beyond Earth. Building on a 2025 IASC proposal for post-detection work in SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) as a transdisciplinary creative knowledge commons, this workshop invites a more experiential engagement with astrobiology and futures methods.

All Worlds, All Times (allworldsalltimes.online) is a performance workshop using structured improvisation to rehearse plural futures. Participants enter contrasting 2050 scenarios and role-play an assembly responding to an anomaly discovery: media artefacts and social narratives invite players to explore collective meaning-making under uncertainty.

Following de la Cadena and Blaser’s pluriverse as a “world of many worlds” and Salazar and Gorman’s “pluriversal articulations” for outer space studies, the workshop opens space to play at plural communication ecologies. All Worlds, All Times grows from the designed scenarios of the SETI Post-Detection Toolkit 2050 (Profitiliotis et al. 2025) and includes collaborative input across SETI and technosignatures research communities. The workshop explores the Golden Record as an ongoing astro-ecological research programme to grow readiness for radically unknown futures.

The commons we won

Co-evolving pluriverse

A good life for most?

What could success look like for a future of more-than-human commoning? How could multiple species and entities co-create commons to regenerate forests, wetlands, grasslands, deltas, seashores, farms, cities, watersheds, and other landscapes? In this roleplay exercise of hope and imagination, we gather a century after the first commons conference (about 64 years from today), to share stories, arts, and insights about how as communities, networks, assemblages, and other relations of more-than-human beings we survived the polycrisis, thrived, and flourished through commoning: how we designed “worlds with room enough for many worlds,” forming “a patchwork discourse of co-evolving communities,” applying commoning practices, rules, and other tools that regenerated landscapes, tamed leviathans of governments and markets, and transformed imaginaries from prefiguration into everyday experience. For this gathering, some may prepare by choosing a non-human actor in a more-than-human commons, and come with a story, lessons, thoughts, questions, or art: picture, poem, or perhaps a drum and a song. Others may arrive and just observe, or perhaps pick a card for an entity: river, coral, fire, elephant, dragon, mangrove, AI-robot, beaver, mother tree, octopus, turtle, snake, storm, or … ? and then imagine, express, and exchange: as actor, keystone species, niche creator, ecosystem engineer, charismatic example, partner, kin, ally, representative, steward, guardian, interpreter, or other roles and relations, about our commoning and the commons we won.

This workshop is relevant across the range of conference themes on commoning. It may use a fishbowl format with 5-15 roleplayers plus others participating in discussion.

Knowledge emerging from grassroots communities, scientific research, and global policy agendas holds transformative potential for shaping how we live together on a shared planet. Yet collaboration alone does not guarantee mutual understanding or equitable knowledge-making. Knowledge is never neutral; it is situated, relational, and continuously translated across people, institutions, practices, places, and more-than-human worlds. This 90-minute workshop introduces the “Layers of Access and Translations” framework as a practical and analytical tool for reflecting on “Phase 0” of transdisciplinary partnership-building: the relational and political groundwork preceding formal collaboration. The workshop starts from the premise that, like knowledge, Phase 0 is never neutral. Funding conditions, institutional mandates, prior relationships, timelines, positionalities, and language already shape who participates, whose knowledge counts, and what a project is allowed to become. Participants are invited to bring their own transdisciplinary cases, whether concerning marine resources, forests, food systems, urban commons, health, migration, infrastructures, climate risks, or other fields. Through creative and collaborative methods, they will apply the framework to their cases and examine how relationality, access, and roles of diverse transdisciplinary partners shape emerging collaborations. Together, participants will generate case-based insights into how the framework can support more reflexive, inclusive, ethical, and transformative knowledge co-production. They will leave with a practical tool for engaging more intentionally with transdisciplinary partnership-building and opportunities for continued exchange.

This workshop invites participants interested in learning more about the science of scaling, to think together about how the science of scaling can be applied to increase the impact of effective governance regimes for common-pool resources, public goods, and common property regimes. This includes ideas around transferability of knowledge and best practices, scaling up to change policy, scaling down to decentralize decision-making, and replication of governance models, among many other scaling concepts. The workshop will start with a presentation of the Core Dimensions of Scaling Framework (i.e., Intention, Design, System conditions), a guiding framework that can be used to design and analyze scaling initiatives in the context of environmental governance and sustainability. The majority of the workshop will be centered around focus group discussions to collectively produce insights on the supporting and enabling conditions for scaling the impact of effective governance regimes for common-pool resources, public goods, and common property regimes such as scaling up to embedded into higher policy levels, scaling down to contextualize decisions, or scaling out to increase adoption or participation. The purpose of the workshop is to connect the expertise of commons scholars with scaling science, while also learning collectively and forward. The workshop is part of and will be led by the research team of the 5-year European Research Council (ERC) project ‘SharedSeas’, to advance the science of scaling effective environmental governance and common property regimes. The content produced in the workshop will contribute to the development of a publication on the opportunities and challenges for scaling the commons, that the workshop participants will be invited to co-author.

This workshop engages in the possibility of memory work–from grassroots practices of memorialization to acts of care between generations–as a mode of commoning. In political economic worlds which govern and transform the politics of memory into the private properties of individuals, corporations, or nation states, we invite participants to explore how memorialization can become a creative mode of struggle against enclosures of shared pasts, presents and futures. As two community-based researchers engaged in memorialization work in Bali, Indonesia, we invite experiments in memory work as a means of care for and with the social relations through which shared worlds, or commons, are enacted and made meaningful.

Inspired by the Prison Songs project, an intergenerational and collaborative process of tracing songs written by victims of mass violence in Bali, Indonesia, this workshop invites participants to experiment with the work of commoning with and through memory. We invite participants to ground these experiments in their experiences and commitments. For the conveners, connecting younger generations with survivors of violence who continue to live in the confines of social death–excluded religiously, socially, and economically from their communities–is a form of memorialization and carework that re-animates new common worlds for survivors, their families, and younger generations.

Using embodied and speculative methods, this workshop on memorialization offers the chance to experiment with commoning, asking: how might the ways we remember transform the shared social lives of our present and future worlds? In doing so, we engage the sensations of the body, the spaces around us, and the politics of imagination. Through this workshop, we offer participants the opportunity to open up our shared pasts, presents, and futures beyond the authority and ownership of a state or a singular individual or family unit, and into a broader field of struggle over our shared worlds.

Public sector teams managing shared resources frequently face Common Property Resource (CPR) dilemmas. This workshop demonstrates how Participatory Generative Agent-Based Modeling (PGABM) enables small teams (~7 people) to run virtual experiments using personalised digital-twins. By reproducing Ostrom/Cárdenas’s foundational CPR experiment[1] using virtual simulations, participants will build digital twins, expose them to institutional "treatment effects" (e.g., communication, graduated sanctions, behavioral nudges, and external regulation), and learn tofeed results back to human teams for self-governance strategies to prevent CPR depletion.

Using Public LLM tools, participants will learn to:

(a) Build Digital Twin Personas: ingest psychometrics interview data into LLM agents to model bounded rationality and group biases

(b) Translate Operational Rules: map institutional grammar and "rules-in-use" into interactive action arenas

(c) Trial Policy Interventions: test mechanisms like graduated sanctions and communication rules to observe behavioral shifts

(d) Run Scenario Ensembles: generate multi-path good outcomes to prevent free-riding and avoid "motivation crowding-out" from top-down regulations

(e) Establish Feedback Loops: build diagnostic workflows where teams analyse digital twin interactions to "agree how to agree"

(f) Calibrate and Document: apply sensitivity analysis, Pattern-Oriented Modeling, and ODD protocols for valid reproduction

(g) Evaluate Outcomes: measure whether policies foster genuine, long-term trust rather than temporary compliance by testing against game-theoretic benchmarks

[1]=Cárdenas, Juan-Camilo, and Elinor Ostrom. 2004. "What Do People Bring Into the Game: Experiments in the Field About Cooperation in the Commons." CAPRi Working Paper No. 32

Research on the governance of common-pool resources draws on a wide range of methodological approaches, from ethnographic and case-based research to comparative analysis, experiments, surveys, network analysis, and other methods. These approaches can be used independently or in combination to examine governance processes across different spatial and temporal scales, shaping the questions researchers can ask and the conclusions they can draw. Awareness of these methodological alternatives can support more innovative, interdisciplinary, and methodologically robust research.

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.

In preparation for the conference, a series of online meetings will be organized for IASC members. These meetings will be used to identify a suitable case and invite scholars to develop short presentations explaining how they would investigate it using a particular methodology.

At IASC 2027, the organizers will first provide a brief introduction to the selected case, ensuring that participation does not require attendance at the preparatory online meetings. Invited scholars will then present contrasting methodological perspectives on the case. These presentations will be followed by a moderated discussion of methodological choices, research questions, and the interpretation of results.

As Elinor Ostrom stated in Governing the Commons, ‘It is not possible to reconstruct how earlier users of [various commons] devised the rules that have survived such long periods. We do not know […] anything about the process of change itself’ (Ostrom 1990). And yet, longitudinal analysis of institutions for collective action (ICAs) has been successfully conducted since the 1990s. Using historical methods, comparative analysis over both space and time promotes our understanding of how ICAs function, what kind of regulations are effective, and how they respond to changes in, e.g., economy, society, or environment – in the past, but also more recently. It is a prerequisite to understand institutional resilience as well as the functional limits of an ICA. Thus, longitudinal research is not only beneficial to historians, but can also support the fields of, a.o., sociology, behavioral economics, CPR studies, and organisation sciences (Moritz 2016; Farjam et al. 2020).

However, a longitudinal approach comes with challenges of its own (De Herde & De Moor 2025). In this panel, we will look into the opportunities and challenges that come with the use of historical methods – i.e., longitudinal analysis – in organisational studies and adjoining fields. Depending on the interests of the participants, the workshop will cover topics such as comparability and dealing with variations over space and time; continuity, incomplete sources, and biases; informing present-day practices with insights from the past or other geographical regions; the translation of results of studies between macro, meso, and micro levels; and/or finding common ground when working in an interdisciplinary way.

The transformation of kampung into a tourism destination not only changes access to resources, but also shapes how shared spaces are valued and represented. This workshop draws on Rangkai Kampung, a participatory research and mobile exhibition project conducted with children in Kampung Yoboi, Papua, Indonesia. The project emerged from an intergenerational gap, in which children's everyday experiences are often not recognized as legitimate contributions to imagining the kampung's changing present and future. Amid the framing of the kampung's landscape as a potential tourism asset, children are often positioned as spectators. Their limited participation intersects with layered hierarchies of customary, religious, and state authority. Rangkai Kampung was designed using participatory mapping and photovoice, through which children developed agency by producing and exhibiting their creative works. The workshop presents the children's process of interpreting space, articulating their experiences, and publicly presenting their work. Selected works are reproduced as a mobile exhibition, allowing children's knowledge to circulate within and beyond the community. The mobile exhibition not only creates opportunities for intergenerational encounters and conversations about shared spaces in the kampung, but also facilitates exchanges of knowledge across disciplines. Participants in the workshop will encounter photographs, maps, stories, and reproduced exhibition elements from Rangkai Kampung. Through a collaborative research-design exercise, they will identify a spatial issue from their own research, consider how lived experience can be engaged through creative methods, and explore how research participants might collectively produce and represent knowledge through an exhibition process.

Human-wildlife conflict interventions often stall not for lack of information but because the people living the dilemma and the planners designing interventions are reasoning from different footing, different day-to-day tradeoffs, objectives, and goals. We present a game-based method to build a shared point of reference, for improved decision-making and conflict resolution. At the first level, we co-design a short, simple, and spatially explicit tablet-based multiplayer game with people who face a specific conflict (in this workshop, we present crop-raiding by elephants as a sample case), built around the real tradeoffs resource users or/and planners navigate. Playing the game surfaces how people actually reason through the dilemma, not just how outsiders assume they do. We apply choice modeling techniques to identify behavior patterns in this game, and port them into the second level: an agent-based model built on the same underlying game. This approach allows us to simulate long-term community dynamics across multiple seasons, varying group compositions, and alternative intervention designs.

In this workshop, participants play through an example of the full workflow themselves: first in groups, playing the tablet game and generating real behavioral data; then individually or in small groups, running that data forward through the second-level model; and finally, discussing how the method could apply to conflicts and species participants bring with them. We invite any and all with interest in finding (fun) participatory methods for putting different groups (people and animals, resource users and resource planners) on common footing.

Commons are sites of bottom-up norm production: approprietors/commoners have power,and capability,to create rules for access, care, collective use and management. Yet these arrangements often clash with the broader legal framework. This is especially true of urban commons, which reuse abandoned spaces for activities and organisational forms that may conflict with multiple regulations, while collective management can challenge existing property regimes.

The workshop explores how researchers can study and help overcome these barriers, developing co-research with commoners that counters academic extractivism. It introduces political-legal hacking (Micciarelli 2022) as hod of translating and re-signifying norms and governance arrangements from other fields—for example, adapting collective land-management principles to urban buildings. Participants bring experience-based barriers concerning use rights, authorisations, liability, planning, decision-making, conflict resolution, citizen involvement or recognition of community-made rules.

The workshop proceeds in three stages. First, participants present problems and select cases for analysis. Second, they reconstruct each barrier’s political rationality and power relations underpinning its legal form. Third, they discuss potential unused legal alternative framings and transferable devices, such as: a legal argument, draft rule, procedural pathway or governance arrangement capable of giving commoning an institutional form. The final phase uses also role-play. Participants represent the actors and viewpoints typically involved in each what if scenario to to assess the proposed hack’s pathway, chances of success and the difficulties involved in implementing it.

There is a longstanding relationship between the field of practice and research on commons that involves the use of games (Cardenas et al., 2013; Ostrom, 2006; Sanil et al., 2024). Experimental games and other interactive experiments have been widely used to test and understand individual and collective decision-making regarding common-pool resource (CPR) management. More recently, the field expanded to examine these interventions as learning process, thereby extending their purpose to produce changes in actual CPR governance (ElDidi et al., 2024; Falk et al., 2023; Janssen et al., 2023).

Likewise, research focused on serious gaming has also been developed focused on commons (Crookall, 2007; Githinji et al., 2025; Powers & Boyle, 1983). In this field, serious games are understood as artefacts that can serve multiple purposes including research and learning, as well as engagement, participation, crowdsourcing solutions, decision-making support and attitude change (Fjællingsdal & Klöckner, 2020; Kleiman et al., 2020; Olejniczak et al., 2020). Consequently, the use experiential learning for education, engagement and attitude change on topics related to collective action extends beyond CPR management.

Given that the development and use of interactive artefacts present several methodological and practical challenges, this workshop aims to explore both the underused potential and the limitations of serious gaming for commons. The objective is to broaden the conversation on CPR governance in experimental games by bridging it with other serious gaming experiences in different fields and diverse aims. The workshop will address various aspects of game use and development including requirement for game development, the design process itself, the experimental setting for gameplay, and other challenges related to producing and deploying games for research and practice.

Community participation often begins after the problem has already been defined. communities are invited to respond to agendas shaped elsewhere. This method's lab begins with a premise: what if listening came before problem definition? drawing from field practice with rural indigenous communities in India, the session introduces the listening architecture tool (LAT), a living approach that places listening at the centre of collective inquiry & action. LAT brings together lived experiences, oral histories, ecological knowledge, aspirations, memories and perspectives often absent from conventional datasets. Its premise is rooted in knowledge governance. community wisdom should not simply become another dataset.

LAT has three movements: experiencing listening as a way of knowing; decode, knowing that hearing does not necessarily mean understanding; and design, moving from decoding to collective action. Participants will experience a listening process, exploring how emotion, silence, context, memory and power shape what is heard. They will ask: who speaks? Who remains invisible? Whose knowledge counts? Who interprets what is heard? The voice report will be used as a tool within LAT for bringing multiple community voices into conversation while retaining contradictions and context. The lab will also examine AI as a supporting layer for transcription, translation, organisation and synthesis at scale. the focus will be on AI assisting practitioners in interpreting what has been heard, while critically engaging with bias, cultural context, data sovereignty, knowledge ownership and interpretive authority. participants will work with a commons challenge from their own context to develop a simple listening architecture. The lab positions listening as an infrastructure for commons.

As the number of creative collectives rises to share resources, offer mutual support, present internationally, and drive social activism, they face a critical question: How do we sustain collective efforts in a system that lacks structural support?

I would like to invite practioners, scholars, policymakers to the workshop "Cosmograming Your Collective.", which is based on the multiyear research on the complex dynamics within change-making collective bodies, and how that impact the sustainability of collective change. This workshop will offer an opportunity for practioners who work from a collective/commual condition, to map out their current challenges and potentials, and receive a "chart reading" on how to best structure their practice based on the Cosmogram of Community.

The Cosmogram of Community is created from nearly 1000 hours of interviews, discussions and workshops with collective across domain of practices, cultural contexts, organisational methods, demographic of members in East Asia and Western Europe. The Cosmogram highlights the importance to balance solidarity and the drive to change, interpersonal relationships and organisational ethics. Rather than focusing on boosting efficiency and productivity, this session centres on critical self-reflection, and intentional strategies that transform individuals and communities.

Manggarai’s climate and environmental challenges are addressed through community governance, yet are compounded by institutions’ failure to recognize how this governance operates. Field research with Yayasan Ayo Indonesia examined how communities govern forests, water, agriculture, and livelihoods through relationships that do not follow external sectoral boundaries. The central challenge is practical: how can practitioners respond to pressures on forests, watersheds, food systems, and livelihoods without fragmenting the relationships through which these systems are sustained?

The community and its environment are one system. Forests support watershed functions and food production; water conditions shape agriculture and livelihoods; and local, nutrient dense food plants such as sorghum provide sustainable resources. Forest degradation can compound watershed stress and reduce agricultural productivity and livelihood security. Treating these relationships as separate problems risks addressing one pressure while undermining another. Integrating these systems may instead help address challenges such as food insecurity and stunting, while strengthening local environmental governance. This creates an unresolved dilemma for practitioners. External programs are often organized through separate sectors, while community governance operates across them. How can practitioners bring interventions into Manggarai without disrupting the relationships that sustain the commons?

We propose a Case Clinic grounded in Yayasan Ayo Indonesia’s experience. Participants will examine where fragmentation occurs, its consequences, and how interventions could work with existing community governance. The aim is to develop practical approaches that support the commons as an interconnected system.

How do we build urban Commons that enable city residents to collectively imagine, test, and adapt to climate and food challenges? Going beyond shared physical assets, urban Commons are convergence points for ideas, projects, and people to intersect, build collective resilience and co-create solutions in resource-constrained cities.

The Maker Space creates an urban Commons framework through 3 interconnected pillars:

1. Experience: Grounding Ideas in Place Neighbourhood hubs turn complex urban challenges into tangible, sensory engagement. Food Experience Centres bring together citizens, schools, local markets, and communities to understand where food originates, how it is produced, and how sustainable choices can become part of daily life.

2. Build: Projects and People in Action Hyperlocal sandboxes provide infrastructure for experimentation. An example is people building hydroponic rooftop gardens and balcony setups. By designing, constructing, and managing these systems, residents demonstrate how scarce urban spaces can support local food production and climate adaptation.

3. Exchange: Sharing Knowledge and Resources These spaces facilitate food swaps, peer-to-peer technology sharing, and open exchange of skills and tools, building trust and strengthening neighbourhood safety nets.

This vision is taking shape in Bengaluru, bringing together designers, makers, executors, technology providers and space owners. The Practioners Lab will showcase these pilots and explore 3 key dimensions for the urban Commons:

1. How do we unlock and govern scarce city space for collective experimentation?

2. How can emerging technologies and AI augment local creativity and community problem-solving?

3. How can these spaces seed viable, climate-resilient jobs and local micro-enterprises?

Social infrastructure is increasingly recognised as essential to resilience, belonging, collective action and community wellbeing. Yet its provision, governance and long-term stewardship remain challenging within urban development systems largely shaped by land value, viability assessments, investment returns and delivery imperatives. Drawing on practice-based research from the emerging Silvertown Social Infrastructure Forum in London's Royal Docks, this workshop explores whether social infrastructure can be understood as a proto-common: a shared domain of interest through which public, private and community actors can negotiate more collaborative forms of urban development.

Rather than presenting a single case study or model, the workshop invites practitioners from different geographical, cultural and institutional contexts to examine a common challenge: How can enduring ecologies of social infrastructure be cultivated within market-led development environments? Participants will collectively explore three questions: Can social infrastructure be designed or only enabled? How can its value be recognised within systems dominated by development viability? What forms of stewardship enable it to endure beyond development delivery?

The workshop combines structured dialogue, comparative practitioner reflection and progressive synthesis. Participants' experiences will form the primary knowledge base, with the Silvertown case serving as a provocation rather than a template. The discussion will be informed by ideas of social infrastructure, collaborative planning, commons governance and "people as infrastructure", while remaining open to alternative traditions and locally situated practices.

Governance of shared resources routinely involves navigating unresolved tensions – overlapping jurisdictions, ambiguous rules, and competing priorities among communities. These situations rarely present a singular cause. They emerge from interacting social, ecological, behavioral, and institutional dynamics that are difficult to unpack using conventional approaches. The absence of tools that can capture these interdependencies often limits collective understanding and slows progress toward potential interventions.

This Practitioners’ Lab introduces Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) as a participatory and system science-informed approach for examining complex governance challenges. FCM enables practitioners to surface key variables, articulate perceived causal relationships, and visualize how interconnections shape the evolution of a problem. Through a series of hands-on exercises, participants will learn how to elicit concepts from stakeholders, construct causal maps, identify loops, and potential leverage points for intervention. The session draws on the instructors’ projects on commons practice, including food systems in the LMICs and challenges in community-based monitoring, to ensure that the approach remains grounded in real governance dilemmas.

Consistent with the Practitioners’ Lab emphasis on peer learning, the workshop will be organized around small group engagement. Using a sample problem on food systems, participants will build and interpret maps collaboratively and reflect on how FCM can support dialogue for governance. By the end of the session, participants will have a foundational understanding of an adaptable facilitation tool they can use to unpack complex governance problems and support collective action.

How do we theoretically frame labour within commoning, and the production and stewardship of commons as work?

The production, stewardship and care of commons involve labour that, in much of the commons literature, is assumed to be voluntary, institutionally subsidised through research, or reciprocal. As forms of commons diversify beyond traditions of natural resources into what Hess calls ‘New Commons’ (Hess, 2008), their forms of production also change. They are not always linked to a clear economy and require innovation, time and often years of relational work to design how they are produced, mobilised, sustained, governed and legitimised. Yet the labour required to make commons possible remains largely under-theorised as work.

This workshop asks how we might frame the production of commons as work and what theories of labour can help us articulate commoning as a job. What happens to our understanding of labour when production is not primarily directed towards accumulation, but towards relationships, care, stewardship and the production of common goods? What forms of value are created through this work, and how might they be recognised?

Prior to the workshop, participants will be asked to propose one academic paper on labour theories that could relate to the production of ‘New Commons’ (Hess, 2008). These do not need to be a close match; participants are invited to bring something they consider relevant, provocative or useful. As facilitator, I will use these contributions to open a collective discussion and exploration of labour in the commons. The material generated through the workshop will ultimately be transformed into an artwork entitled ‘Labour in the Commons’.

Indigenous communities in Indonesia are winning long-term management rights over forest lands. However, market access for timber and non-timber forest products (NTFPs) remains blocked by regulations, logistical issues, certification costs, and power imbalances within the supply chain. This Practitioners' Lab will bring together community representatives from the Talang Mamak and Pangkalan Kapas (Riau), Representation of seventeen Dayak Communities in Ketapang (West Kalimantan) and Hutan Adat Kajang (South Sulawesi), Namblong Tribal communities (Papua) who have varying levels of exposure to management initiatives and certification, to enable them to access the market. They will be joined by researchers, regulators, buyers, and an FSC, RSPO certification practitioner to co-design actionable 'tenure-to-livelihoods' pathways. Moving beyond success stories, the session will foreground the unresolved challenges that emerge in the field after tenure wins are secured. Using interactive problem-solving, the session will prototype compliance routes (including FSC Forest Management/NTFP and Ecosystem Services claims), and financing instruments that support diverse livelihood outcomes. The session will produce one-page pathways for each case study, as well as a consolidated set of practitioner-tested recommendations for commons governance, certification and policy. The session will convene practitioners to openly deliberate practical issues arising from commoning processes and to discover pathways for co-creating solutions, in line with the Lab's bridge between theory and real-world governance challenges. Outputs: One page "tenure to livelihoods" pathway per case; consolidated practitioner tested recommendations for commons governance, certification, and policy.

We would like to run a place-aware leadership development game that has been developed as a part of the Advanced Leadership Program at the East West Center, Hawai'i. The game is based on a river basin as a context that draws lessons on adaptive leadership useful across various contexts - be it forests, rivers, coastal and marine commons, cities, or issues like climate change, disasters and even day-to-day team dynamics and partnerships. It is based on literature on Adaptive Leadership by Heifetz et al, as well as Elinor Ostrom's foundational work on commons governance and uses principles of systems thinking, social ecological resilience and group decision-making to equip players with a leadership language required to affect collective action for long-term and generative change in their contexts. It is restricted for 8 players. This game not only uses commons governance as a context and as evidence, it also equips participants with leadership capacities and language to work on the commons. In this, it attempts at contributing to literature on commons and commoning such as Raman and Denis (2025, and particularly, that on games and commons such as Falk et al (2023), Janssen et al (2023) and so on, through a demonstrated practice in a gamified format. In addition to this, the game attempts to expand leadership literature and practice on collective and relational leadership through a convergence of literatures on adaptive leadership (e.g. Heifetz et al., 2009), collective leadership (e.g. Fairhurst et al., 2020), leadership as practice (e.g. Raelin, 2017), and the indigenous leadership theories emerging from social ecological resilience and transformations (e.g. Gram-Hanssen, 2021).

This session explores climate adaptation and risk pooling as strategies for building resilience to climate shocks, drawing on practitioner experience with mutual aid and collective risk-sharing mechanisms.