Two internship opportunities have been advertised with the IDRC in climate change related areas. The first deals with local benefits from payments for environmental services (PES) and the second with climate change adaptation - see this link for details. The website mentions other internship opportunities in addition to these two.
Research and teaching fellow with RMAP, teaching with the Masters in Applied Anthropology in Participatory Development. Interested in community based resource management, particularly livelihoods and linkages between local and wider governance systems in Asia and the Pacific.
This is my last in a series of posts from the 12th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons. The final session, a roundtable discussion on Authority, Property and Democracy, was facilitated by Ashwini Chatre and included Jesse Ribot, Andy White, Anne Larson, Melissa Leach and Elinor Ostrom as panelists.
Ribot challenged researchers to move on from discussions on the ‘tragedy of the commons’, which he said was a dead horse, to examine and better understand the dynamic, contested nature of the commons within their larger political economy. A few speakers from the floor responded that the ‘tragedy’ is very much alive and well in the minds of policymakers, leading to related policies of ‘enclosure’, and therefore could not be walked away from just yet.
Leach set out two main challenges for researchers in this field. Firstly, she saw a need to shift global and national institutions towards more deliberative and reflective governance where powerholders understand their own subjectivities. Secondly, related to the first point, we need to bring local knowledge and perspectives into debates - not in a glorified sense, but for their substance and to enable social justice. Read the rest of this entry »
Those interested in reslience and commons research may already know of the editorial by Elinor Ostrom in the May 2008 issue of Global Environmental Change. Ostrom’s keynote at the IASC Conference dinner, like this paper, argued for a need to define a set of diagnostic questions and variables to better understand multi-scale social-environmental systems and the problems these are currently facing. The GEC paper maps out a working set of variables in more detail, which her group aims to further develop through interaction with scholars across disciplines.
As someone who tends to work across disciplinary and spatial boundaries I find this a really important contribution, but also wonder how this fits with the more contextualised knowledge that my colleagues are so good at producing. I think we need both, and conversations between.
The high point of the conference dinner though was sharing a drink (or several) with my friend Floriane Clements of University of Newcastle, who had just successfully defended her PhD thesis that afternoon - Ostrom being one of the examiners. Congratulations Floriane!
Day 2 of the 12th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons was as busy and stimulating as the first. In the morning I followed a panel session organised by Fikret Berkes, which brought together a series of case studies and overview papers dealing with community based enterprises. Berkes’ own paper analysed the management of several community enterprises in terms of their the organisational structures and relationships. Factors affecting the resilience of these bodies in the face of turbulence and change were discussed, for instance the idea that having redudancy (more linkages than are seemingly necessary) provides these enterprises with a ‘plan B’ and a degree of resilience.
Many of the case studies presented in this panel picked up the theme of how indigenous enterprises were grappling with social sustainability issues in striving for a balance between enterprise viability, equity and community values. Read the rest of this entry »
So far it has been worth the long journey to the 12th Biennial meeting of the International Association for the Study of the Commons. Monday afternoon saw the lauch of 2 new books that may be of interest to readers of this blog:
Colfer, CF, Dahal GR and D Capistrano, 2008. Lessons form Forest Decentralization: Money, Justice and the Quest for Good Governance in Asia-Pacific. Earthscan/CIFOR.
Sikor, T. 2008. Public and private in natural resource governance: a false dichotomy? University of East Aglia/Earthscan.
I went to the launch for the second book, where there was a stimulating discussion around the idea that public and private are not just categories of ownership, but “choice domains” that empower or disempower particular actors.
My paper on benefit sharing in collaborative forest management (which some may remember from the RMAP seminar last week) was part of an interactive mini-symposium on this theme run by colleagues from ODI and Ford Foundation. Read the rest of this entry »
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