Making Commons Dynamic

With an emphasis on the challenges of sustaining the commons across local to global scales, Making Commons Dynamic examines the empirical basis of theorising the concepts of commonisation and decommonisation as a way to understand commons as a process and offers analytical directions for policy and practice that can potentially help maintain commons as commons in the future. Focusing on commonisation-decommonisation as an analytical framework useful to examine and respond to changes in the commons, the chapter contributions explore how natural resources are commonised and decommonised through the influence of multilevel internal and external drivers, and their implications for commons governance across disparate geographical and temporal contexts. It draws from a large number of geographically diverse empirical cases -- twenty countries in North, South and Central Americas, and South- and South-East Asia. They involve a wide range of commons - related to forests, grazing, wetlands, coastal-marine, rivers and dams, aquaculture, wildlife, tourism, groundwater, surface freshwater, mountains, small islands, social movements, and climate. The book is a transdisciplinary endeavour with contributions by scholars from geography, history, sociology, anthropology, political studies, planning, human ecology, cultural and applied ecology, environmental and development studies, environmental science and technology, public policy, indigenous/Tribal studies, Latin American and Asian studies, and environmental change and governance, and authors representing the commons community, NGOs, and policy. Contributors include academics, community members, NGOs, practitioners and policy-makers. Therefore, commonisation-decommonisation lessons drawn from these chapters are well suited for contributing to the practice, policy and theory of the commons, both locally and globally--