Natural Resources Conservation 525 - Governing the Commons

Over the last decade or more, there has been a detectable and growing dissatisfaction among students with the "status quo" in the way the society works. Students have witnessed terrorism, long-term war, the "Occupy" movement, a "great recession," ongoing social inequities, disfunctional politics, the effects of climate change with challenging projections on its effects to come, and most recently, a global pandemic followed by inflation with a great impact on the economy. Over the years I?ve interacted with many students who looking for models of hope and alternatives to the status quo on how society at local, regional and global levels might operate to collectively address problems. For me, when I feel down about the state of our world, commons and commoning give me hope. While the idea of commons and commoning undoubtedly go back thousands of years, it feels to me like we may be at an inflection point where commons are being rediscovered, and in many settings, new commons are forming in ways humans have never organized before. I hope this seminar will provide you with some new and enlightening ideas that you can take with you and perhaps innovate in your career moving forward. In this course, we will examine historical and contemporary commons cases. We will explore how these forms of social organization might be used to change the way we humans interact. Central to these discussions will be learning methods for studying commons governance, called "Institutional Analysis," and one focal activity in the course will be a project where we ?open the hood? of the commons and study the governance and management of four active ?commoning? cases. Our overall goal is to study commons and commoning cases -- and get inspired.