Social Analysis

This introduction outlines an approach to commons that captures and responds to intersecting social, environmental, and political complications. The extractive power of states and corporations has long threatened the lives and livelihoods of the poor. However, contemporary local struggles are not adequately understood by frameworks that rest exclusively on social and political power. Climate change and the lingering effects of colonial and industrial extraction multiply the threats to the wider ecologies on which human lives depend. Debates on the commons have addressed such struggles, but without sufficient attention to the diverse bioethical regimes that underpin conventional commons. We propose that such attention can inform analyses by moving beyond the narrow singularities of modern categories. Our introduction lays the groundwork for an approach to the commons that pays attention to multiple and intersecting modes of dispossession, while also looking at convening or ‘commoning’ practices that are oriented toward building alternative relational worlds.

Fifty years ago, an upstart oil company built a mammoth refinery in the US Virgin Islands. Colonial officials, intent on shifting the island economy from peasant provisioning to petro-prosperity, stomped out collective agriculture on the island. The first dispossession: profit against the commons. Operating with imperial impunity, the refinery authored the destruction of the island's ecology. When it became impossible to ignore, the refinery filed for bankruptcy (twice) to shed all responsibility. Today, extensive contamination brings real fear of toxicity lurking in the land and the sea. The second dispossession: pollution preventing any easy return to the commons. This article reflects on a ‘disfigured commons’, describing how toxicity now forcefully extends a project of dispossession. And what the community in St. Croix is doing about it.

This article examines the compound dispossessions experienced by Zele fishermen in a wetlands ecology materially transformed by pollution. ‘Enclosure by contamination’ conceptualizes how capitalist activities can change the biophysical properties of commons with dispossessive effects on human and more-than-human health and abilities to sustain life, far beyond sites of extraction. By historicizing enclosures in Bengal, I suggest that the term khas (public, state-owned) can be used to expand the usage of ‘commons’ beyond community-based natural resource management. Second, I show how the movement of toxic residues through ‘fluid commons’ changes the very material qualities and affordances of these entangled soaking ecologies. Lastly, I argue that specific ecological characteristics of fluid commons enable evasion of liability and must be addressed in efforts to make ship recycling ‘green’.

Radioactive wastes, once discarded with little concern for the spread of contamination, are now subject to concerted state-sponsored efforts to produce secure and effectively perpetual containment infrastructures. Current UK policy is to bury the wastes in a geological disposal facility. The siting of this facility depends on the identification not only of a site with suitable geology but one where residents are demonstrably willing to host the facility. The article focuses on the diverse ‘commoning’ practices that this voluntaristic policy has brought about, including the possibility of articulating a common good across diverse scales of time and place, of acknowledging the tensions between economic and ecological needs, and ultimately of struggling to reconfigure ‘the commons’ itself as a lived space of ongoing deliberation and intrinsic uncertainties.

What happens to our understanding of property regimes when they are analyzed through the case of a translocated colonial fish? The British introduction of trout to South Africa led to enclosures through restrictions on access to trout streams, but also through comparisons with British landscapes ‘at home’. These compound dispossessions went hand in hand with a commoning of access for White people to a fish and a sport reserved for elites. Today, debates over trout as an alien species are entangled with post-apartheid struggles over property rights and restoration. While property relations are relations between people, this case shows that relations between people and fish, and the properties of fish, help us understand processes of dispossession, commoning, enclosures, and a bioethical regime in contemporary South Africa.

The notion of energy commons is explored through a radical example from Nepal, where a grassroots initiative made domestic biogas widely accessible to villagers, not just the rural elite. The article examines different logics and layers of commoning practices at work. These are variably visible to outsiders, are refashioned by development processes, and have the potential for frictive dissonance between layers. They also show how commons-related social practices and institutions can influence energy transitions. Inequalities in energy livelihoods can be addressed by extending who participates in energy innovation. Here, inclusive adoption of biogas was partly enabled by collective rights to take livestock to common pastures, showing the potential of just energy transition through commons practice rather than techno-centric orientations.

Recent Arctic warming is a threat to Sámi reindeer herding in the Nordic region as more frequent freeze-thaw episodes temporarily block the reindeers’ access to lichen under the snow. But climate change is only one of the many other contemporary challenges affecting reindeer husbandry, which include the effects of wind turbines and mineral extraction. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Sámi reindeer owners in Finnmark, Norway, this article discusses how ‘compound dispossessions’ are mitigated and negotiated in relation to Sámi notions of reindeer-herding practices and colonial legacies. The author argues that Sámi reindeer herders are facing ‘uncommon grounds’ due not only to climate change and infrastructural encroachments, but also to repeated mistranslations that amplify compound dispossession in a region marked by shifting bioethical regimes.

In the southwest of Australia, fire-prone forests have been shaped by prescribed burning practices for several decades. Those who live in the region share a common good in the form of a cultivated landscape made safer by deliberate interventions. In recent years, however, a combination of climate change and the effects of forest interventions over the past century is destabilizing this condition, making the landscape as a common good more ambiguous, more dangerous, and more unknown. In situations like this, I argue that a key part of commoning, or the work of maintaining the ties that support safe and livable life, lies in a kind of response. Fire managers respond by sharing concerns, gradually taking into consideration new influences and creating actionable affective triggers.

Concerns about species extinctions have produced efforts to stabilize these losses and to do so on a planetary scale. These conservation efforts call upon the language and politics of the commons, although in often divergent ways. Using ethnographic research that examines efforts to save the California condor, I analyze the moral claims that animate these conservation practices. The specter of the Sixth Extinction has led conservation communities to treat the Earth as a ‘planetary commons’, albeit an apocalyptic one. Yet ‘touching extinction’ produces practices of bioethical care that exist and resist the abstractions of the planetary commons. Lastly, I offer an example of condor reintroduction into the Grand Canyon to illustrate how these commoning practices have the potential to enact ‘uncommon worlds’.