--- with apologies for cross-posting ---

 

Governing the commons in agriculture: institutions, scales and practices

 

A call for abstracts for a paper session at the 6th Annual Dimensions of Political Ecology (DOPE) Conference, 26-27 February 2016, Lexington, Kentucky, USA.

 

Session organizers: Federica Bono, Maarten Loopmans and Matthias Bussels (KU Leuven)

 

Over the past two decades, local agro-food systems have increasingly gained attention in both research as well as practice as an ‘alternative’ to the mainstream industrial agro-food system. The local has been described as the preferred scale to produce more ‘socially just’, ‘high quality’ and ‘sustainable’ food, thereby ignoring interrelations with the larger scale systems they are embedded in (MacDonald 2013,Goodman et al. 2014). The role of the broader ecological, political, socio-economical and infrastructural context underpinning the variability of actually existing local agro-food systems should however not be ignored.

 

This session wants to tackle this scalar neglect from the angle of the multiscalarity of the commons.  The literature on the commons has come to acknowledge that the inevitable interactions between local communities and the wider society produces an institutional diversity of commons governance (Young 2002, Berge and van Laerhoven 2011). Addressing these interactions opens up pathways to analyze commons governance at and between a variety of scales (Ostrom et al. 1999).

 

Interpreting the management of local agro-food systems as a commons problem allows us to explore how the ecological and institutional specificity of a place interacts with community-based governance models and supralocal regulatory structures. We welcome papers that analyze practices of commons governance at the interplay between the local scale and the broader institutional context. The session wants to discuss how different approaches to the governance of agro-food commons are produced, resulting in variable outcomes in relation to social justice, inclusive production processes and sustainable land use at different scales. We want to bring together papers that research cases of local agro-food systems in both the global North and Global South, to provide a comprehensive discussion of how interscalar interactions of social institutions in different contexts produce variegated local mixes of regulating agro-food commons.

 

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] before November 27^th.

We will contact everyone no later than November 28^th. Please note that all presenters and participants will be expected to register to the conference by December 1, 2015.

 

References

Berge, E. and F. van Laerhoven (2011). "Editorial: Governing the Commons for two decades: a complex story." International Journal of the Commons 5(2): 160–187.

Goodman, D., E. M. duPuis and M. Goodman (2014). Atlernative Food Networks. Knowledge, Practice and Politics. New York, Routledge.

MacDonald, K. (2013). "The morality of cheese: A paradox of defensive localism in a transnational economy." Geoforum 44(93-102).

Ostrom, E, Burger, J, Field, C. B, Norgaard, R. B and Policansky, D(1999). Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges. Science284(5412): 278–282.

Young, O. R. (2002). Institutional Interplay: The Environmental Consequences of Cross-Scale Interactions. in E. Ostrom, T. Dietz, N. Dolsak, P. C. Stern, S. Stonich and E. U. Weber (eds.), The Drama of the Commons. Washington, DC, National Academy Press: 263-291.