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            <title><![CDATA[Contested Urban Commons: Lived Realities From Cape Town, South Africa]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1598</link>
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            <pubDate>Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Natural resources represent important ‘commons’ for resident urban commoners. Where communities need to practice both consumptive and non-consumptive use of natural resources in the process of commoning, this can generate contestation, in particular between the practitioners and conservation officials if there is disagreement about how nature should be consumed. Such contestation is likely to be high when this concerns limited resources within geographic confines of a city with a political history of socio-economic exclusionary practices of the poor. Using a relational approach to human and non-human interactions, this article uses three nature reserves and a conservation area in the City of Cape Town, South Africa, where surrounding communities use resources to graze livestock, source firewood, harvest medicinal plants, harvest sand, practice cultural rituals and in some instances occupy nature reserve/conservation area land. Although most of these activities are deemed illegal, there are multiple ways in which township dwellers provide for themselves despite a system that continues to separate humans from non-human nature. We observe that rather than openly resisting exclusionary enclosure, Cape Town’s marginalised communities find ways of operating outside the impositions of the current management system. The social, economic and political dynamics require some kind of compromise between the user communities and managers if sustainable use practices are to be achieved for mutual positive outcomes going forward.]]></description>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Urban Commons as a Shared Space of One’s Own: Appropriation, Commoning and the Welfare State]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1723</link>
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            <pubDate>Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Urban, historical commons exist in several Western cities. Such urban commons are interesting in how rights of access and use of land have been negotiated over time in the same space. Furthermore, they are never enclosed or locked, and they are important for health and leisure in cities where the amount of green space per capita decreases. Urban commons are spaces where people, in spite of very different backgrounds, co-inhabit and create meaning and belonging in public space. Based on archival material, 33 structured interviews and participant observations this article investigates the various spatial practices that take place in Enskifteshagen in Malmö Sweden, a historical common converted into a green space in the 1940s and still in use. The article uses appropriation and commoning in its analysis to capture urban simultaneity in terms of access and rights of use. In addition to previous research on urban commons, the study shows that everyday casual use, memories, and sensory experiences are crucial for a deeper sense of meaning-making and belonging. The article discusses the implications of the urban context, the Swedish welfare state and the historical connotations of urban commons. In conclusion the article suggests that the contemporary urban commons can be defined as a shared space of one’s own.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[The Norwegian Energy Commons: Re-Thinking Dynamics Between the State, the Market and Civil Society]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1674</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[The idea of the commons has increasingly entered the field of renewable energy research. Often articulated as a bottom-up practice based on collective self-governance, the commons are positioned as a third mode of social organization, beyond the state and the market. At the same time, tensions exist within the scholarly literature whether the concept should be seen in strict opposition to, or in relation with the state and market. This paper argues that these tensions and the conceptual diversities generally seen in the commons literature necessitate context-specific translations of the commons-concept to make the concept meaningful across different policy fields and cultural and institutional settings. By revisiting the history of Norway’s energy governance regime, particularly in the context of hydropower and wind power, the paper shows how the idea of the commons has been present as a moral notion of energy resources as shared. This notion has been operationalized in Norwegian energy management as a form of commons within the state. In doing so, the paper contributes to the broader debate on understanding possible interlinkages between commons, state, and market, and address an undertheorized dimension in current energy scholarship – i.e., the overlap between the three dimensions. Rather than viewing energy commons as strictly opposed to state or market-based systems, the paper argues for a conceptualization that acknowledge and engage with their interdynamic relationship.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Interlinking Biodiversity Prioritization and Commons Recognition: Insights from a New Institutional Political Ecology Perspective (NIPE)]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1575</link>
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            <pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[In modern societies, biodiversity is associated with the notion of pure nature, which is not only devoid of human intervention but also under threat from humans. From an ecological anthropological perspective, this paper argues that this naturalistic ontological separation of nature and culture is not shared by most societies in the Global South. Instead, there is a view that humans and non-humans share a world co-created by humans. According to this view, the biodiversity observed from these local perspectives is the result of human–non-human interactions in common property systems. This paper demonstrates how the diversity of common pool resources (CPRs) is shaped by locally crafted institutions (rules, laws and norms) that have regulated their management for centuries and shaped, co-created, and maintained cultural landscape ecosystems. Additionally, local communities have contributed to the diversity of domesticated plants and animals. However, this diversity is undermined by colonial processes that grab global commons, including the expansion of protected areas. We use a new institutional political ecology (NIPE) model to explain the different power processes whereby biodiversity becomes a newly valued commodity that is simultaneously used to exclude commoners. Using comparative research on African floodplains, the paper argues that biodiversity prioritization should recognize common property institutions.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Power of Care in Youth-Based Commoning for Climate Justice]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1573</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This article examines the role of care in commoning practices within a youth-led climate justice movement through an intersectional lens. While scholarship on commoning identifies care as central to sustaining economies, communities, and the environment, less attention has been paid to how diverse modalities of care—shaped by race, gender, immigration status, and colonial power relations—structure participation, belonging, and political subjectivities within climate justice movements. Drawing on interviews with youth climate organizers, the article uses Tronto’s ethic of care to examine how practices of caring about, caring for, caregiving, care-receiving, and caring with cultivate shared purpose, mutual reciprocity, and solidarity. The findings show that care functions as a relational infrastructure for commoning by building and sustaining emotional bonds. However, care is also messy, partial, and implicated in the reproduction of unequal power relations. Racialized and immigrant members often carried disproportionate emotional labor while simultaneously navigating structural risks that white members did not always recognize, revealing limited engagement with the links between climate justice, coloniality, and privilege. Thus, care practices can coexist with exclusion, neglect, and uneven participation, even within a movement committed to justice. Attending to who performs the most labor-intensive forms of care opens possibilities for redistributing care work more equitably and fostering more reflexive and inclusive forms of commoning. Rather than framing climate justice solely as a technocratic or policy project, the article argues for understanding it as a relational and political process rooted in everyday practices of care, reflexivity, and solidarity.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Sustaining the Territory with Agave Pulquero in Rural Mexico: A Transdisciplinary Approach to More-Than-Human Care Commoning]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1640</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[The acceleration of monoculture, including that of agave pulquero, has threatened the preservation of a life-sustaining territory in rural Mexico. Recent studies from the natural and social sciences, which have overwhelmingly identified agave’s commercial benefits to humans, overlooked the damage caused by monoculture and the socioecological interdependencies that contribute to the preservation of the territory. This paper conceptualizes the shared damaged territory as a commons and collective efforts by nonhumans and humans surrounding agave pulquero that contribute to the regeneration of the damaged territory as more-than-human care commoning. To illuminate the complex efforts, we employ a transdisciplinary approach that incorporates knowledge from the natural and social sciences, as well as that of non-Western growers. Revealing three interdependencies: among nonhumans, between nonhumans and humans, and among humans, where care enacted through the agency and labor of nonhumans and humans is nested within one another, this study constructs narratives that enable ethical responsibility for fostering multispecies flourishing.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Are Digital Knowledge Commons Real Commons?]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1691</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This article examines whether collective and voluntary practices of online knowledge production, such as Wikipedia and free/open-source software (FOSS) projects, can genuinely be considered commons in Elinor Ostrom’s sense. It argues that it is contributions, rather than access to knowledge, that function as the regulated, subtractive resource, in the projects developed and managed by a collective. In these projects, which succeeded in attracting contributors, contributors compete for publication spaces and peer attention, creating the need for governance systems analogous to those in traditional commons. It shows that digital knowledge projects exhibit structural parallels with physical commons, such as hierarchical bundles of rights, differentiation between users and contributors (who consume the subtractive resource), and policymakers, as well as the centrality of monitoring and rule-making to sustain cooperation. Digital infrastructures (e.g. knowledge artifact modularity, algorithmic tools, and platform architectures) facilitate large-scale participation while enabling scalable monitoring and nested governance structures. These technologies also facilitate community formation, where membership is achieved through sustained contribution and recognition rather than pre-defined boundaries.The article concludes that not all open or collaborative digital projects qualify as commons; only those in which a community collectively governs access to the subtractive resource do so. It also raises open research questions concerning sanctions, conflict resolution, multi-layered governance and the evolving relationship between digital commons, institutional frameworks and their socio-technical environments.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Can Spatial Planning Be Transformative? Regenerating the Commons and Commoning Regeneration: The Case of the Ex-Isotta Fraschini Factory in Saronno, Italy]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1608</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Challenges such as growing inequalities, environmental degradation, gentrification, and housing crises demand renewed approaches to spatial planning and urban regeneration models. Yet, conventional spatial planning instruments often remain technocratic and reflect neoliberal paradigms, prioritising spatial efficiency and private interests over socio-spatial relationships and public interests. Recent legal scholarship and case law have started to challenge this paradigm, reframing urban regeneration as an integral part of spatial planning oriented toward a balanced development of the territory and its community. Building on this view, the paper proposes a framework to reinterpret spatial planning for urban regeneration as a co-production process oriented towards the commoning, where diverse actors with heterogeneous values and interests engage in (re)generating the territory as a common while simultaneously (re)producing the community and its social fabric. The ex-Isotta Fraschini urban regeneration project in Saronno (Italy) serves as an illustrative case, highlighting the legal and institutional gaps that hinder the transition to this renewed approach. The paper also argues that urban space is never neutral, and spatial planning is inherently political. Addressing these challenges requires governance models and instruments that are both adaptable to the local context and institutionally guaranteed, to ensure communities’ meaningful participation in co-production processes and to counteract fragmented and market-driven interventions.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[When Services Matter: Rethinking Farmer Cooperation in an Export-Oriented Smallholder Setting]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1687</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Why does agricultural cooperation remain fragile in post-socialist settings, despite its potential to reduce transaction costs and improve market access? Explanations usually stress institutional voids and the legacy of distrust. This paper advances a different view: farmers cooperate when the services offered are economically salient. Adapting Ostrom’s SES framework, we reinterpret “resource importance” for club goods, specifically cooperation services such as marketing, certification, and input procurement. Using survey data from Albanian farmers in a context-specific export-oriented smallholder setting, we develop validated measures of service salience and buyer power. Logistic regression indicate that perceived benefits, compliance costs, and buyer dominance all increase cooperation, while satisfaction with buyers reduces it. Socio-demographics have little effect. The study contributes by extending SES theory to club goods, providing robust constructs for empirical research, and identifying a mechanism through which cooperation emerges as a rational response to market imperfections in similar value-chain contexts.
&nbsp;
JEL Codes: C38; D7; J54; P32; P2]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Toward Making Power More Explicit in the IADF: A Review and Diagnostic Approach to Power Theories]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1595</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[In commons and institutional research, the Institutional Analysis and Development framework (IADF) has proven itself as a useful tool to investigate the complexities of social-environmental systems. It is effective in guiding researchers through the process of understanding complex problem situations. The framework helps to conceptually unravel the institutional scaffoldings structuring human-nature interactions. Yet, a long-standing critique of the IADF and its derivatives is that they fall short of making different workings of ‘power’ explicit, especially those illuminating structural and intersectional aspects. We believe that the IADF holds potential to help operationalise a large variety of perspectives on power and visualise how they may play out in commons governance regimes – a potential that has been underused thus far.
In this paper, we draw on discussions about the necessity and advantages of integrating the study of institutions and power and engage with various conceptualisations of these terms. We reflect on existing proposals for such an integrated analysis, highlighting the contribution of our broad approach to understanding power. Further, we lay out the methodology we used for reviewing literature on power theory and identifying related empirical questions, mapping these questions to different IADF elements in a coding matrix, and creating the basis for the development of a diagnostic tool from this initial mapping. In a section dedicated to theoretical framing, we outline the main approaches to power that inform this paper and then continue to introduce the pathway toward our diagnostic tool through a few exemplary applications, including a discussion on limitations and potential next steps.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Legal Pluralism in the Commons: The Case of Toyooka, Japan]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1616</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This paper examines the role of law in contemporary commons revitalisation projects through a case study of satoyama restoration in Toyooka City, Japan. While research on Japanese commons has traditionally focused on common-pool resource governance (iriai), we argue that current revitalisation efforts are better understood as commoning, which foregrounds the relational and ongoing co-production of social and ecological life. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Toyooka City, we examine how legal norms emerge through interactions between local communities, the Oriental White Stork (Ciconia boyciana), and formal legal institutions. Our findings explore how customary practices, including stork-friendly farming and habitat restoration, might constitute emergent legal orders rooted in multispecies relationships, shared responsibilities, and situated environmental knowledge. These legal orders do not operate independently of state law but interact with national legislation and international conservation frameworks, including endangered species protection and the Ramsar Convention. Rather than supporting a binary distinction between customary and state law, the Toyooka case demonstrates the coexistence of multiple legal orders within commons governance. This meaningfully expands the discussion on the role of law in commoning scholarship, by moving beyond concepts, such as ‘commoners’ law’, to examine the dynamic interactions between customary, state, and international legal orders. In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on the legal dimensions of commons governance and demonstrates the value of ethnographic approaches for analysing the plural and more-than-human character of law in social-ecological systems.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Navigating the FPIC Traps in Gabon’s Protected Area Expansion: A Path to Inclusive Conservation]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1617</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Exclusive conservation has developed over thousands of years through protected area creation. Today, in order to achieve global conservation targets it is recognised that exclusive conservation can no longer be used. Rather, inclusive conservation has now become a rallying cry, and has been integrated into the Global Biodiversity Framework and the policies of various conservation NGOs. However, shrugging off thousands of years of baggage is hard. While there is the intent of including local communities in management systems in conservation, it lacks the recognition of their common property institutions by which they have been managing local common-pool resources (forests, wildlife, fisheries, etc) and which are more than just natural resources to be managed or protected but their territories of life and cultural landscape. Therefore, is apparent both at the global and local levels, the baggage linked to conservation acts like an anchor, resulting in the implementation of inclusive conservation not always being straight forward as the case of Batéké in southeastern Gabon show. Using the example of protected area expansion on their commons, this action-paper shows how the good intent to carry out inclusive conservation is fraught with difficulties, with historical, cultural and educational baggage even impeding the Free, Prior and Informed Consent process. This paper concludes with recommendations, that had previously been given to the various actors and communities implicated in the park expansion, by recognising their commons and the way of relatedness to their territories of life.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Practical Knowledge Commons: A Study of the Maker Community in Delft]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1592</link>
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            <pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This research explores how practical knowledge commons in makerspaces are developed, challenged, and sustained. Adopting the Governing Knowledge Commons framework, the study focuses on Makerspace Delft, a community of makers and hobbyists in Delft, the Netherlands. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews (N = 15), triangulated with six months of weekly participant observation. The results show that practical knowledge is primarily embodied in people and transmitted through practice rather than stored in objects or facilities. Accordingly, the core facilities of the resource system are not repositories or archives but structured opportunities for real-time interaction, such as supervisor shifts, training sessions, and collaborative projects. The case reveals a nested social dilemma. At the first level, members are willing to share knowledge but face a public good problem in participation: the private costs of engaging in collective activities are immediate, while the benefits are diffuse and delayed. At the second level, the very infrastructures that could lower participation costs — projects, communication channels, and governance structures — are themselves shared goods requiring costly provision. Drawing on the joint production framework, the study argues that the culture of informality characterising the community is itself a social infrastructure, jointly produced through everyday practice and resistant to transformation because the private costs of institutional entrepreneurship exceed the individually capturable benefits. The study contributes to the knowledge commons literature by offering a first application of the GKC framework to a makerspace, to the makerspace scholarship by introducing an institutional analysis focused on collective action, and to knowledge management studies by exploring community-based, decentralised modes of practical knowledge governance.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Radical Relationality from the Periphery: Water Movements and Liminal Commons in Southeast and Central Europe]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1672</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This article examines how water movements in European semi-peripheries enact radical relationality through concrete struggles over water, infrastructure, and governance. Based on a comparative analysis of five cases from Serbia, Poland, and Greece, it shows how communities respond to privatization pressures, ecological disasters, and governance failures by transforming defensive mobilizations into liminal commons – durable yet flexible arrangements that emerge within institutional uncertainty and are grounded in territorially embedded hydro-social identities.
Focusing on semi-peripheral contexts marked by legal pluralism, fragmented authority, and incomplete marketization, the analysis shows how ruptural moments create institutional gaps that enable collective learning, institutional bricolage, and the reconfiguration of governance practices. In these cases, liminal commons emerge as transitional arrangements maintained through negotiation, relational practices, and care-based norms.
By empirically grounding radical relationality in specific hydro-social territories, the article contributes to commons scholarship by demonstrating how semi-peripheral conditions shape distinct pathways from water defense to commoning, highlighting the roles of crisis, territorial embeddedness, and relational identities in contemporary struggles over water governance.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Jaguars in the Commons: Napo Runa Perspectives on Human-Jaguar Conviviality]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1671</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Neoliberal conservation practices are increasingly contested, with calls for more convivial ways of preserving the natural environment, which move beyond capitalist and naturalistic logics. Discussions of conviviality shed light on the importance of the Commons and existing institutions that shape human-nonhuman interactions. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews in several indigenous communities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, this article explores human–predator relations and the active role of jaguars within an indigenous forest Commons. Negotiations over human-jaguar institutions occur through forest encounters, creating an everyday conviviality between local indigenous people and the beings of the forest. The analysis shows that both human and nonhuman agency constitute the foundations upon which institutions for coexistence and forest resource management are built. Accordingly, this article argues for an expanded understanding of the Commons that recognizes nonhumans as co-constitutors of Commons, which offer a pathway toward more sustainable human–environment interactions.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Re-Enchanting the Commons through Community-Based Governance to Grow Civic Virtue for Social-Ecological Sustainability]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1752</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Given limited institutional capacities to externally motivate collective action (CA) for social-ecological sustainability, this article considers how organisation of this CA affects internal or autonomous motivation (civic virtue) for this action. Its argument builds on prior Bloomington-school commons scholarship that was influenced by self-determination theory in proposing that civic virtue for CA increases the more our basic psychological needs are supported. Community-based governance grounded in the subsidiarity principle is argued to have advantages over other governance arrangements for affording such support (including in re-enchanting human relations with Nature), and thus for growing civic virtue for CA towards sustainability. For any available level of institutional capacity to externally motivate pro-sustainability behaviours, therefore, organising CA for sustainability through such community-based governance can be expected to yield greater progress towards this goal than other governance arrangements. The argument is illustrated by the case of Australia’s Landcare initiative which seeks to promote self-reliance among rural landholders in working collectively to solve shared problems in sustaining their respective lands.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Managing the Messy Middle: Toward a Typology of Dilemmas in Nature-Based Recreation]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1667</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Nature-based recreation systems are complex social-ecological systems (SESs) characterized by competing uses, heterogeneous users, and dynamic feedbacks. As participation grows and recreational modes diversify, managers face mounting challenges in sustaining both ecological integrity and user experience. This paper operationalizes the Coupled Infrastructure Systems Framework (CISF) to develop a systems-based typology of recreation management dilemmas. We identify four primary and four secondary dilemma archetypes that emerge from management interventions or feedback loops. Using coded case studies across diverse recreation modes, we explore how exogenous shocks, endogenous dynamics, and system characteristics shape dilemma emergence and visibility. Our findings highlight the importance of user heterogeneity, monitoring capacity, and feedback stability in shaping management outcomes. We conclude by outlining a portfolio of interventions and discussing how managers can anticipate unintended consequences, tailor strategies to local contexts, and use system-specific models to inform management. This typology offers a foundation for future modeling efforts and supports more adaptive, equitable, and resilient recreation governance.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Governing Communal Forests in Rural Zimbabwe: The Incentive Mechanisms Embedded Within Governance Structures]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1591</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Though several studies have proved a vast dependence on non-timber forest products (NTFPs) by rural households in developing countries and that NTFPs production and trade is a source of income, community participation in the governance of communal forests remains minimal. To understand the incentives for the governance of communal forests, this study assesses the incentive mechanisms embedded within governance instruments and the way in which the mechanisms purportedly work; and then identifies the governance challenges. Primary data was collected using a combination of semi-structured interviews, narrative interviews and focus group discussions in Chiredzi and Mwenezi districts in south-east lowveld of Zimbabwe. Secondary data included NGO reports and newspaper articles. The data was analyzed using thematic content analysis. The themes were generated deductively based on institutional mechanisms that incentivize participation in governance (moral, material, mutual reassurance and empowerment mechanisms) The results show that moral mechanisms seem to be covering natives through customs, norms, and traditional beliefs; and those involved in formal NTFPs trading through obligations and commitments of certification programs while leaving outsiders and hawkers with neither spiritual motivation for environmental conservation nor formal/informal sanctions for non-compliance with regulations. Material mechanisms through financial and technological transfers have promoted the creation of new institutions for rural households and parallel power structures at the local level as international standards, commitments, and obligations are incorporated into legislative policies. However, this creates tension between leaders whose authority is rooted in ancestral sanction versus those elected by the people as the mandate at the local level often remains ambiguous. Overall, the governance system has a highly complex dis/incentive framework making it unappealing for rural households to view the marketing of NTFPs as an incentive for forest governance.]]></description>
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            <title><![CDATA[Land-Based Commons for Housing and Inclusive Cities: A Contribution from the Global South. Introduction to the Special Issue]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1805</link>
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            <pubDate>Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This paper introduces the special issue “land-based commons for housing in the Global South”. It provides an overview of recent literature on commons as applied to land and housing, and proposes a specific analytical framework that highlights three key elements to be examined: the realization of the social function of land and property, the long-term preservation of land at an affordable price, the potential for dissemination and scaling up. The final section discusses the six articles through three cross-cutting questions: communities’ agency and the tools for collective action, the role of public authorities and institutions, and the challenges to sustainability and long-term viability. This collection aims to contribute to the debate on land and housing commons by offering nuanced, empirical insights into the multifaceted dynamics of land and housing management. It also sheds light on the challenges, innovations and socio-political complexities of securing and managing land for housing in various urban contexts in the Global South.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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            <title><![CDATA[Conflicts in Forest Commoning: A Case Study of Indigenous Communities’ Struggle in India’s Gadchiroli District]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.5334/ijc.1604</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Despite the vast literature on managing the commons, research on the politics around property rights regimes intended to reshape management practices and bottom-up responses, particularly from Indigenous communities (ICs), remains scanty. We examine conflicts around a top-down introduction of policy rooted in colonial law aimed at regaining post-colonial management control devolved over forest resources in India and the actions taken by field-level actors and ICs, practicing democratic forest management. Drawing on first-hand experiences and observations, interviews, and policy documents, we analyze significant and connected events unfolding at multiple administrative levels. We find community actions to assert institutional preference drew on authority embedded in the institutions of marginalized communities and were influenced by policy catalysts sharing value homophily, knowledge about relevant policies, and internal functioning of the government. In addition to demonstrating the potential role of bottom-up framing power and institutional authority to resist top-down authoritative power, we contribute to the emerging literature on commoning by showing how historical practices and their outcomes shape communities’ institutional preferences.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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