The number of citizens’ collectivities in Europe is rising exponentially. This trend is visible in other parts of the world too. Citizens are making themselves heard through what is often referred to as “commons” . They are taking matters into their own hands and organizing themselves in sectors such as health care, infrastructure and energy. A growing number of collectivities means a growing demand for knowledge and know-how, but also an exchange between theory and practice. How do you organize the governance for a collectivity in a sustainable way? What are the rules of the game that can best be agreed between parties? And how should governments respond and participate?

Between 10 and 14 July, academics and experts from the professional practice will be gathering in Utrecht at the XVI Biennial IASC-Conference: ‘Practicing the Commons’. This will be the largest international commons meeting ever, with 570 presentations from over 65 countries, delivered by academics, people from practice, and policy makers.

According to Tine De Moor (Professor of Social and Economic History at Utrecht University), the driving force behind the conference, the commons are booming, both within science as in society. ‘This is due to such issues as the increasing privatization and retreating government. People come together to seek solutions to this.’ The conference brings together practitioners, academics and other stakeholders, such as the government. De Moor sees governments wrestling with the question of how to deal with the burgeoning number of citizens’ collectivities properly. ‘It requires an entirely new way of thinking for governments. But this is crucial to the future of citizens’ collectivities. And citizens’ collectivities in turn are crucial to the future of our society.’

Keynote speakers
The conference will be opened by the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science, Jet Bussemaker. The keynote speakers are:

Practitioners’ labs

Practical experiences will be shared in fourteen Practitioners’ Labs. During these sessions, it will become immediately apparent how citizens’ collectivities function, which issues practitioners are facing and what science has to contribute. The labs will address such issues as:

• The role collective action games can play, not only to measure propensity for collective action, but also to improve management of the commons (based on initial applications of collective action games for water management in Colombia and India).
• How can local governments incorporate the active involvement of the city inhabitants in the definition and management of public resources such as cultural spaces, city budgeting or administrative structures? How to deal with initiatives that conflict with other governmental core responsibilities, such as equality before the law? In several labs practitioners and experts from cities all over Europe will discuss these issues.
• In Kenya 20% of the 13.5 million farmers are currently organized in a producer cooperative. How can cooperatives play a role to meet future food demands, with an expected world population of 9 billion people in 2050?

For all info on the conference, visit the conference website at https://2017.iasc-commons.org.

For press accreditation or interview requests, please contact press officer Eva Vriens, +31 (0)6 109 736 36, iasc2017_press@uu.nl

Nowadays there is a renewed interest in commons among citizens. A booming number of new citizens’ collectivities in a wide variety of sectors are set up around the world. Initiatives ranging from sustainable energy to care, infrastructure, and nature conservation: citizens are building new institutions through self-governance and cooperation.

Along with this booming number of commons, the scientific attention on the development of commons is growing rapidly. A global platform where citizen initiatives and scholars come together seems more important than ever, therefore, with great pleasure Utrecht University presents the largest conference on Commons, ‘the XVI Biennial IASC-Conference’ (July 10-14 , 2017).

Leading up to the conference we would like to give you a bit of a foretaste on some of the finest speakers at this conference. Today we introduce you

Sofia Croso Mazzuco – Unused public spaces can launch grassroot community and urban development

The innumerable underused public spaces in cities worldwide can become places where people collaborate to create alternative service provision and development, a researcher in the UK says. Where that occurs, city dwellers find they have a new community resource they can all use – an “urban commons” – that can in turn help city governments to better support their citizens as cities become more and more complex, the research shows.

While David Cameron’s 2011 “Big Society” agenda for the UK failed, grassroot projects based on regeneration of public spaces can, with appropriate government support, build urban commons that ultimately achieve the goals of that agenda – including empowering communities, encouraging government-plus-community generation of services, and promotion of individual action for community development, the research suggests.

For more information, attend the presentation in Utrecht on Wednesday July 12, 2017, 09:00 to 10:30, at UCK-Domplein, Room 1.15 (first floor) or contact Sofia Croso Mazzuco (sofiacmazzuco@gmail.com or phone +44 7 490 389 959)

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About the XVI Biennial IASC-Conference

At the XVI Biennial IASC-Conference ´Practicing the commons´ (10- 14 July) you will find various ways to engage in societal and academic debates on commons. The intention of this conference is to not only facilitate the exchange of scholarship between researchers working on commons (working and living across the globe), but also to bring to the fore the interaction with practitioners of commons, hence the title of the conference ‘Practicing the commons’.

The conference has an international character with over 700 registered participants representing over 65 countries. The keynote speakers are prof. dr. Saskia Sassen, prof. dr. Jane Humphries, and prof. dr. Juan Camilo Cárdenas. The event hosts various workshops, over 120 academic sessions, 14 practitioners’ labs, 4 round tables and 3 clinics.

Read more about the conference

Nowadays there is a renewed interest in commons among citizens. A booming number of new citizens’ collectivities in a wide variety of sectors are set up around the world. Initiatives ranging from sustainable energy to care, infrastructure, and nature conservation: citizens are building new institutions through self-governance and cooperation.

Along with this booming number of commons, the scientific attention on the development of commons is growing rapidly. A global platform where citizen initiatives and scholars come together seems more important than ever, therefore, with great pleasure Utrecht University presents the largest conference on Commons, ‘the XVI Biennial IASC-Conference’ (July 10-14 , 2017).

Leading up to the conference we would like to give you a bit of a foretaste on some of the finest speakers at this conference. Today we introduce you

Purabi Bose – 250 Million traditional people in India need protection of land and water rights

Some 250 million people in India on the margins of society are threatened by outside interests. They need recognition of their traditional rights to land and water resources they have used for generations, a young Indian scholar and filmmaker says.

The Indian government is not properly protecting India’s traditional peoples, who are hunter-gatherers, nomadic pastoralist and herders, or dwellers in forest, Dr. Purabi Bose says. They and their lands face constant inroads, from powerful corporations pushing for mega projects in mining, oil palm plantations and deforestation, to urbanization and even to wildlife conservation projects that decry traditional users as causing human-animal conflicts. The traditional users of Indian forests, lands and water resources end up being called “encroachers” on their own land.

To begin to address this problem, Bose proposes that in India these millions of people be recognized as “forest citizens” with legitimate claims to the resources they have used in common or with individual rights for so long. She notes that the government of India has failed to identify these people as “indigenous,” with the kinds of resource rights recognized by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, even though India is signatory to that declaration.

Bose’s research and her proposal are unique because she pulls together data from a wide ethnic diversity of indigenous, tribal and local communities living in distinct landscapes all over India, from desert grasslands to mountainous bamboo forests. She notes that the lands and waters traditionally used by these peoples provide them with an informal food security system difficult to replace and deserving of protection; its value amounting, in food and nutritional value alone, to USD 2.5 billion a year.

Bose, who served as a jury-panel member at India’s Independent People’s Tribunal in 2016, will present her proposal in early July in Utrecht at the biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons.

Purabi Bose, PhD, is a Social Scientist and a regular at the IASC conference since 2000.

She is visiting scholar at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Purabi is also using documentary film-making to discuss India’s stand on forest and land rights of marginal populations or ‘forest citizens.

Additional info:

– Landing Together Films, www.landingtogether.weebly.com

– About author: https://www.linkedin.com/in/purabibose

– Bose’s recent short documentary film, TARA- Alpinia nigra (see trailer here https://vimeo.com/206222340). The film projects indigenous people’s ‘way of living’ in remote otherwise fragmented landscapes in India

– India’s Independent People’s Tribunal Final Report at http://fra.org.in/document/IPT%20FRA%20final%20report.pdf

For more information, attend the presentation in Utrecht on Tuesday July 11, 2017, 11:00 to 12:30, at UCK-Domplein, Studio 0.20 (ground floor) or contact Purabi Bose(purabibose@gmail.com; phone +31 6 53 27 52 94 (from now till mid-July)

About the XVI Biennial IASC-Conference

At the XVI Biennial IASC-Conference ´Practicing the commons´ (10- 14 July) you will find various ways to engage in societal and academic debates on commons. The intention of this conference is to not only facilitate the exchange of scholarship between researchers working on commons (working and living across the globe), but also to bring to the fore the interaction with practitioners of commons, hence the title of the conference ‘Practicing the commons’.

The conference has an international character with over 700 registered participants representing over 65 countries. The keynote speakers are prof. dr. Saskia Sassen, prof. dr. Jane Humphries, and prof. dr. Juan Camilo Cárdenas. The event hosts various workshops, over 120 academic sessions, 14 practitioners’ labs, 5 round tables and 3 clinics.

Read more about the conference

Nowadays there is a renewed interest in commons among citizens. A booming number of new citizens’ collectivities in a wide variety of sectors  are set up around the world. Initiatives ranging from sustainable energy to care, infrastructure, and nature conservation: citizens are building new institutions through self-governance and cooperation.

Along with this booming number of commons, the scientific attention on the development of commons is growing rapidly. A global platform where citizen initiatives and scholars come together seems more important than ever, therefore, with great pleasure Utrecht University presents the largest conference on Commons, ‘the XVI Biennial IASC-Conference’ (July 10-14 , 2017).

Leading up to the conference we would like to give you a bit of a foretaste on some of the finest speakers at this conference. Today we introduce you

Dalton Erick Baltazar – Another inconvenient truth: We waste our wastes

A city of nearly half a million people, in the Philippines, wastes USD 1.5 million a year by failing to manage recyclable waste, a major research project has found. And the good news is that the poorest people in the city are likely to get involved in recycling more material, in response to education campaigns, the researchers found.

Calamba City, in the Philippines – the country’s hot springs “resort capital” some 50 kilometers south of Manila – was the topic of study by the Sustainable Waste Management Network (SWAN) Project. The project is a joint effort of the University of the Philippines Los Baños and Osaka University and Ritsumeikan University in Japan. Calamba City pays USD 2.3 million annually to a contractor to collect and dispose of mixed household wastes. The research findings reveal that around 49 percent of the 40,000 tons of recyclables produced by households every year go unmanaged (dumped somewhere, burned, or buried). If those items were recycled instead, the city would see a savings of USD 1.5 million annually, which it could spend for other environmental and livelihood projects.

The research shows that the average household in the city holds about 3 kilograms of wastes any day, 50 percent of which are recyclables. The type of waste varies: Poor households (earning less than USD 36 monthly) generate mostly biodegradables and soft plastics that are hard to recycle, while low- and middle-income households generate more hard-plastic wastes that are easier to recycle.

Poor households generate more wastes than low- and middle-income ones. And project results suggest that poor households tend to recycle more than low- and middle-income households even if all of them have equal awareness of waste and recycling issues. Poor households are, in fact, more willing to contribute time for a better waste management system. This may be so because these poor households are “less busy” and are more open to information and education campaign officers of the city.

These results clearly establish the importance of information dissemination in changing the attitude of households toward waste management. The SWAN Project ultimately aims to build a network of local government units, practitioners, researchers, and other communities that would help raise awareness and improve solid waste management practices.

For more information, attend the presentation in Utrecht on Wednesday July 12, 2017, 11:00 to 12:30, at Academiegebouw, Zaal 1636 (ground floor) or contact Dalton Erick Baltazar (dalton.baltazar.64a@kyoto-u.jp).

Download presentation

About the XVI Biennial IASC-Conference

At the XVI Biennial IASC-Conference  ´Practicing the commons´ (10- 14 July) you will find various ways to engage in societal and academic debates on commons. The intention of this conference is to not only facilitate the exchange of scholarship between researchers working on commons (working and living across the globe), but also to bring to the fore the interaction with practitioners of commons, hence the title of the conference ‘Practicing the commons’.

The conference has an international character with over 700 registered participants representing over 65 countries.  The keynote speakers are prof. dr. Saskia Sassen, prof. dr. Jane Humphries, and prof. dr. Juan Camilo Cárdenas. The event hosts various workshops, over 120 academic sessions, 14 practitioners’ labs, 4 round tables and 3 clinics.

Read more about the conference

The IASC2017 Conference Organizers are happy to announce the publication of the revised version of the conference schedule. We thank our participants for their feedback on the preliminary version. Please have a look at the new schedule via https://2017.iasc-commons.org/sessions.

Additional questions? Please contact us at iasc2017@2017.iasc-commons.org

The IASC2017 organizers are happy to announce that the preliminary presentations schedule has been published on https://2017.iasc-commons.org/sessions. The schedule is preliminary in the sense that it is still subject to changes required in case of severe problems or errors.

Due to the large number of presentations, the organizers have tried to accommodate most scheduling request, we ask your understanding if this has not been rewarded. Also, some late registrations completed after the authors’ deadline of June 1 may not yet have been included; we will try to find a solution for these cases.

In case of any severe errors, please contact the conference organizers via iasc2017@2017.iasc-commons.org. Please note that new requests for rescheduling will not be taken into account.