In Common (The In Common Team)

In this episode, Michael spoke with Nejem Raheem. Nejem is an associate professor of economics at Emerson College. They talked about Nejem’s work on ecosystem services and how he applied this framework to the traditional acequia irrigation systems of New Mexico. They discussed several important challenges that this approach faces, such as the incommensurability of different values and the downplaying of reciprocal relationships that many humans have with the environment.

Nejem’s website: https://www.emerson.edu/faculty-staff-directory/nejem-raheem

 

References:

Raheem, N., S. Archambault, E. Arellano, M. Gonzales, D. Kopp, J. Rivera, S. Guldan, et al. 2015. “A Framework for Assessing Ecosystem Services in Acequia Irrigation Communities of the Upper Río Grande Watershed.” WIREs. Water 2 (5): 559–75. https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1091.

Raheem, Nejem, and Danielle Schwarzmann. 2021. “Making Ecosystem Services Flexible: Why a Whole New Framework Is a Bad Idea for Practitioners.” WIREs. Water 8 (6). https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1553.

Paper that Michael mentions on the “tribe of the Econ”:

Leijonhufvud, Axel. 1973. “Life among the Econ.” Economic Inquiry 11 (3): 327–37. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-7295.1973.tb01065.x.

Book by James Ferguson that Michael mentions Ferguson, James. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine:’development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. University of Minnesota Press.

This insight episode is from episode 041, Michael and Courtney's interview with Cassandra Brooks. 

Cassandra is an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Prior to joining CU Boulder, Cassandra was a core member of The Last Ocean, a grand-scale media project focused on the Ross Sea, and her efforts helped lead to the adoption of the world's largest marine protected area in the Ross Sea, Antarctica. 

In this insight episode, Cassandra talks with Michael and Courtney about her work to establish marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean, and the complicated nature of international geopolitics. 

 

Cassandra's homepage: https://www.colorado.edu/envs/cassandra-brooks 

A recent paper by Cassandra and colleagues on the policy development process in the Antarctic: 

Brooks, C.M., L.B. Crowder, H. Österblom, and A. L. Strong. 2020. Reaching consensus for conserving the global commons: The case of the Ross, Sea, Antarctica. Conservation Letters 13(1):289. 

 

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In this episode, Michael speaks with Tony Sutton, Assistant professor of Native American Food Systems at the University of Maine. Michael and Tony talk about the role of academics and researchers working with local communities and Tony’s research with the Wabanaki people who he works with as an equal partner. Tony also discusses how he views the distinction between scientific and indigenous knowledge as artificial and unhelpful. Finally, they discuss a project that Tony is involved in called the Maine Shellfish Learning Network (https://themudflat.org/). This network seeks to build relationships and communication around issues facing clam and mussel harvesters in Maine. One particularly pressing issue that Tony discusses with Michael is the loss of access such harvesters are facing as a result of displacement by incoming homeowners who purchase houses on the coast of Maine, as well as through Maine state policy that privileges sedentarism, requiring residence in a town as a criterion for fishery access, which marginalizes the Wabanaki and other people whose lifeways involve moving through a landscape to adapt to changes in resource availability.

In this episode, Divya speaks with Sharachchandra or Sharad Lele, Distinguished Fellow in Environmental Policy and Governance at ATREE (Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment) in Bangalore, India. They discuss two of Sharad’s books, “Democratizing Forest Governance in India” which he co-edited with Ajit Menon, and his other book titled “Rethinking Environmentalism: Linking Justice, Sustainability and Diversity,” which he co-edited with Eduardo Brondizio, John Bryne, Georgina Mace, and Joan Martinez-Alier. Divya and Sharad use the discussion on the books as a way to unpack some of the fundamental questions like why are rights necessary, what is the meaning of democracy, and what is the role of state in the current context. They also talk about colonialism and its imprints on forest governance in postcolonial India. Sharad argues that, in the context of India, a country that has been traditionally hierarchical and where the state or the federal agency has all the powers, there are still colonial structures that are embedded in the system that reinforces those hierarchies. He suggests that recognizing citizens’ rights and their ability to exercise them fully is one way to break away from colonial and hierarchical mindsets. 

Towards the end, Sharad shares that the commons is an arena with enormous scope for interdisciplinary work, yet academia and its various disciplines tend to fragment those spaces. He suggests that people working on the commons need to be alert to such tendencies and break away from the confines of a discipline by continuously asking how and in what ways their work can produce knowledge for meaningful change.

 

References: 

Sharad’s bio: https://www.atree.org/users/dr-sharachchandra-lele

1. Agarwal, Anil, and Sunita Narain. "State of India's environment, 1984-85. The Second Citizens' report." (1985).

2. Lélé, Sharachchandra M. "Sustainable development: a critical review." World development 19.6 (1991): 607-621.

3. Lélé, Sharachchandra, and Richard B. Norgaard. "Sustainability and the scientist’s burden." Conservation biology 10.2 (1996): 354-365.

4. Lele, Sharachchandra Madhukar, and Ajit Menon, eds. Democratizing forest governance in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014.

5. Lele, Sharachchandra, et al., eds. Rethinking environmentalism: Linking justice, sustainability, and diversity. Vol. 23. MIT Press, 2019.

6. Lélé, Sharachchandra, and Richard B. Norgaard. "Practicing interdisciplinarity." BioScience 55.11 (2005): 967-975.

7. Wutich, A., Cardenas, J. C., Lele, S., Pahl-Wostl, C., Rauschmayer, F., Schleyer, C., ... & Zwarteveen, M. Integrating Sustainability, Justice, and Diversity?.

8. Lele, Sharachchandra, et al. "Adapting to climate change in rapidly urbanizing river basins: insights from a multiple-concerns, multiple-stressors, and multi-level approach." Water International 43.2 (2018): 281-304.

 

Stefan and Michael interview Henrik Österblom.

Henrik is the Science Director of the Stockholm Resilience Center and a Professor at the University of Stockholm in Sweden.

He has a PhD in Marine Ecology from the Department of Systems Ecology at Stockholm University, and a Master’s Degree in Behavioural Ecology from the Department of Zoology at Uppsala University.

He is interested in marine ecosystems and ways to improve ocean stewardship. Starting as a seabird ecologist, with a particular interest in social interactions between alcids, he has worked on understanding how the Baltic Sea is managed, how international collaboration emerged to address non-compliance in Southern Ocean fisheries, and how transnational corporations shape the present and future ocean. Ongoing work is focusing on the role of science in society and the cultural evolution of global prosocial behavior. He has worked at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and as Special Advisor to the Swedish Government in the Secretariat for the Environmental Advisory Council.

Österblom has facilitated the Keystone Dialogues, a global co-production project including major private actors in global seafood, which has resulted in the establishment of the Seafood Business for Ocean Stewardship (SeaBOS) initiative, aimed to transform global seafood towards more sustainable practices. This project is funded by the Walton Family Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. He is also principal investigator of project New solutions to marine problems, aimed at accelerating marine ecosystem knowledge through the use of autonomous drones and artificial intelligence and funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation.

Österblom is a member of the Expert Group for the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy and member of the IMBER Human Dimensions Working Group. He serves on the international advisory board of the South American Institute for Resilience and Sustainability Studies (SARAS²), as board member of Race for the Baltic, and as chairman of the SeaBOS Fundraising foundation. He is subject editor for Ecology and Society, and PLOS One.

Henrik’s SRC page

https://www.stockholmresilience.org/meet-our-team/staff/2008-01-09-osterblom.html

Seafood Business for Ocean Stewardship project

https://seabos.org/

 

Unsustainable science (extended pdf also includes a Spanish version of the paper): https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(19)30017-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS259033221930017X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

SARAS work on connecting science and art: https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/issues/view.php?sf=112

The keystone actor analysis:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127533

Developing SeaBOS and its initial results:

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/34/9038

The “Ocean 100” analysis: 

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/3/eabc8041

 

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In today’s episode, Courtney and Stefan are speaking with Kimberley Peters.

Kim is a Professor Marine Governance at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB), a research organisation in collaboration with the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) and University of Oldenburg (UOL), in Germany.

As a human geographer, she is interested in the social, cultural and political workings of the world around us. Her research group seeks to explore how governance does not just happen anywhere, but somewhere, and is shaped by spatial processes. Her work investigates how the geography of what we seek to govern, or do govern, is shaped by location, the character and qualities of place and relations with surrounding spaces.

In the episode, she reflects on how geography has dealt with and is influenced by its historical legacy, and how much of the current perspectives in human geography are critical because of that history. We also discuss her relationship to teaching and her students, working in an interdisciplinary institute, leaving your disciplinary comfort zone, and the research topics she is currently pursuing.

Kim has provided a list of references below regarding the history of geography for further information, as she notes that her perspectives are only one of many and not fully comprehensive. She encourages listeners to read the pieces below:

For a good overview of the history and 'turns' of geography see: Cresswell T (2013) Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction. Wiley Blackwell: Oxford

On geography's relation with colonial and imperial practice: Driver F (1993) Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire. Wiley Blackwell: Oxford.

On geography's relation with 20th Century German geopolitics: Klinke, I., & Bassin, M. (2018). Introduction: Lebensraum and its discontents. Journal of Historical Geography, 61, 53-58.

On closing Geography departments: Sacks B (2015) What happened to the American geography department?​ Geography Directions (online): https://blog.geographydirections.com/2015/04/08/what-happened-to-the-american-geography-department/ 

On decolonialism and geography: Esson, J., Noxolo, P., Baxter, R., Daley, P., & Byron, M. (2017). The 2017 RGS‐IBG chair's theme: Decolonising geographical knowledges, or reproducing coloniality?. Area, 49(3), 384-388

 

https://kimberleypeters.com/

Your Human Geography Dissertation:

https://study.sagepub.com/yourhumangeography

Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity:

https://hifmb.de/

Kim's Twitter

https://twitter.com/drkimpeters?lang=en

 

 

This insight episode comes from full episode ninety-two with Kaitlin Cordes.

Kaitlin is an international lawyer and researcher who focuses on human rights and sustainable development. Most recently, Kaitlin spent eight years developing and leading the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment’s work on land, agriculture, food systems, and human rights.

Kaitlin talks with Michael about her work at CCSI on coffee production and commodity chains, where she worked to ensure sustainability and resilience in the production chain, as well as living wages for farmers. 

Kaitlin’s website: https://www.kaitlincordes.com/

This ‘Insight’ clip is taken from full episode 026, Michael and Stefan’s conversation with Emily Darling and Georgina Gurney.

Emily is a Conservation Scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, and Georgina is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University.

In the clip, they both reflect on lessons learned from a transdisciplinary social-ecological coral reef monitoring project conducted in multiple countries.

Emily’s website: http://www.emilysdarling.com/

Georgina’s website: https://www.coralcoe.org.au/person/georgina-gurney

New paper led by Georgina: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632071931420X

Smith Conservation Research Fellowship that Emily enrolled in: https://conbio.org/mini-sites/smith-fellows

SNAPP program website: https://snappartnership.net/

Data mermaid tool website: datamermaid.org

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In this episode Michael spoke with Sara Meerow, an assistant professor at the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. Sara is an interdisciplinary social-ecological systems scientist who focuses on urban geography and planning. Sara spoke with Michael about her work on the concept of urban resilience and on multifunctional green infrastructure projects, and the ways in which such projects often favor biophysical interventions to deal with stormwater-related sewage overflows, rather than broader environmental and social issues such as heat and pollution.

Sara's website: https://sgsup.asu.edu/sara-meerow

References:

Meerow, Sara, and Joshua P. Newell. 2019. “Urban Resilience for Whom, What, When, Where, and Why?” Urban Geography 40 (3): 309–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2016.1206395.

Meerow, Sara. 2020. “The Politics of Multifunctional Green Infrastructure Planning in New York City.” Cities  100 (May): 102621. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.102621.

In this episode, Stefan interviews Achim Schlüter. Achim is a Professor of Social Systems & Ecological Economics at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. He is also the Social Science Department leader and head of the Institutional and Behavioral Economics working group at the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT). He has interests in processes of institutional development and change, privatization and what influences human behavior, where he has focused attention on coastal systems, specifically in Indonesia, Peru and Senegal, among others.

In the episode, Stefan and Achim discuss his career path focused on privatization processes and commons governance including his dual focus on behavioral experiments and qualitative institutional analysis. Later, collaboration challenges in science are explored, and challenges of doing research away from your home country.

 

Achim’s institutional webpage

https://www.leibniz-zmt.de/en/marine-tropics-research/who-we-are/achim-schlueter-en.html

 

Achim’s Google Scholar

https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=L5ONyegAAAAJ&hl=de

 

In Common webpage

https://www.incommonpodcast.org/

 

This Insight Episode comes from full episode 111 with Dan Holland.

Dan is a senior scientist at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center within the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, more commonly known as NOAA. Dan is also an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, Chair of the Science and Statistical Committee of the Pacific Fishery Management Council, an associate editor of Marine Resource Economics, and a former President of the International Institute for Fisheries Economics and Trade (IIFET).

Dan talks with Michael about his work on risk pools, a form of collective-based management where fishers combine their quotas for species with the potential to constrain overall catch. They touch upon the pros and cons of this system as well as a few examples.

Dan’s website: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/contact/dan-s-holland-phd

References:

Holland, Daniel S. 2018. “Collective Rights–Based Fishery Management: A Path to Ecosystem-Based Fishery Management.” Annual Review of Resource Economics 10 (1): 469–85. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-resource-100517-023110.

In this episode Michael spoke with Josh Stoll, an assistant professor of Marine Sciences at the University of Maine. Josh spoke with Michael about the trends in and relationship between wild catch fisheries and aquaculture in Maine. He also spoke about his professional identity, place attachment to Maine, and his oyster farm that he manages. Finally, they discussed the Local Catch Network that Josh co-founded to strengthen community-based fishing systems.

 

Links:

Josh's website: https://joshua-stoll.com/

Local catch website: https://localcatch.org/

 

References:

Stoll, J. S., H. M. Leslie, M. L. Britsch, and C. M. Cleaver. 2019. Evaluating aquaculture as a diversification strategy for Maine’s commercial fishing sector in the face of change. Marine Policy 107:103583.

 

This insight episode comes from full episode 102 with Erin O'Donnell.

Erin is an Early Career Academic Fellow at Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne, where she is a water law and policy specialist focusing on water markets and governance.

Erin and Michael discuss the evolution of how the environment is seen and understood within the legal framework, as well as the differences between Western and Indigenous understandings of the environment, and what that means for the rights of nature movement as a whole. 

Erin's Website: https://law.unimelb.edu.au/about/staff/erin-odonnell

References: O’Donnell, Erin. 2018. Legal Rights for Rivers: Competition, Collaboration and Water Governance. Taylor and Francis.

This is the first episode of our new series titled ‘Commoning'. Stefan, Michael and Courtney are joined by Michael Schoon (ASU) to discuss the following questions:

What makes a good scientist?

How do we transparently communicate the limitations of our research, without undermining it’s perceived value for our peers, journals and the public?

 

Michael Schoon

https://sustainability.asu.edu/person/michael-schoon/

 

Similar to our Insight series, the ‘Commoning’ series will have its own numbering system for reference.

As we are aiming to expand the type of content we provide on the podcast, the Commoning series will provide informal discussions among our podcast team, and we will be inviting additional guests to join us. Topics for discussion on this series will be wide open. This may include current events, recent topics on research, teaching and practice, reflections on previous interviews, or simply, whatever comes up! We want to provide an episode series that is not focused specifically on a guest, but allows for an open conversation on a wide range of topics.

We are calling this the ‘Commoning’ series, as we believe the term embodies the core values we are trying to put forward with this podcast. Providing a space for open, fun, but also critical conversations for our listeners, to share ideas and knowledge that can contribute to our science community.

This insight episode is from episode 006, Stefan’s interview with Sonya Graci.

 

Sonya Graci is an Associate Professor at the Ted Rogers School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Ryerson, University in Toronto, Ontario. She is also the Director of the Hospitality and Tourism Research Institute. Sonya has worked on numerous projects around the world related to sustainable tourism development and has focused her attention on community capacity building in Honduras, Indonesia, Canada, Fiji and China. She has a keen interest in working with Aboriginal communities in developing sustainable forms of tourism. She also has a passion for increasing sustainability in marine environments and has focused much of her research on sustainable tourism development in island states. Sonya is the author of two books and several journal articles and industry publications.

Sonya's links

https://www.ryerson.ca/tedrogersschool/hospitality-tourism-management/faculty-and-research/sonya-graci/

https://accommodatinggreen.com/

https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=GVQ1fy8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

 

 

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In this episode, Michael speaks with Alex Smalley, an expert in Environmental Psychology and researcher at the University of Exeter. Alex’s research program explores, in his words, “the cognitive and emotional impacts of virtual encounters with the natural world”. He has collaborated extensively with the BBC in the UK, including in the creation of a wonderful podcast entitled “The Healing Power of Nature”.

An important take-away from Alex’s work is that virtual experiences with nature can have a positive impact on our well-being, and that this effect is stronger for those with previous experiences with the natural environment itself. This undelies another important lesson, that virtual experiences in nature should be seen as an important complement of but not a substitute for the real world. But with many of us spending most of our time indoors, such a complement can prove to be very important, as Alex explains during the interview.

 

References:

Alex’s website: https://medicine.exeter.ac.uk/people/profile/index.php?web_id=Alexander_Smalley

Audible podcast: https://www.audible.com/podcast/The-Healing-Power-of-Nature/B0CLW481KM

Smalley, Alexander J., Mathew P. White, Rebecca Ripley, Timothy X. Atack, Eliza Lomas, Mike Sharples, Peter A. Coates, et al. 2022. “Forest 404: Using a BBC Drama Series to Explore the Impact of Nature’s Changing Soundscapes on Human Wellbeing and Behavior.” Global Environmental Change: Human and Policy Dimensions 74 (May): 102497. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102497.

Smalley, Alexander J., Mathew P. White, Rebecca Sandiford, Nainita Desai, Chris Watson, Nick Smalley, Janet Tuppen, Laura Sakka, and Lora E. Fleming. 2023. “Soundscapes, Music, and Memories: Exploring the Factors That Influence Emotional Responses to Virtual Nature Content.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 89 (August): 102060. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102060.

In this episode, Michael speaks with Peter Stein, a managing director at The Lyme Timber Company in Hanover, New Hampshire.

In addition to his current work, Peter has a long history of work in the land conservation movement. He was one of the founding staff of the Trust for Public Land, eventually becoming a senior vice president there. Michael and Peter discuss the history of the land trust movement and the challenging but still evolving relationship it has had with equity and community rights. Later on they talk about Peter’s role at Lyme Timber, which is what is known as a Timber Investment Management Organization, or TIMO. Peter described how his move there was at a fortunate time, given several important transitions that were occurring. First, there was a large divestment of paper products companies of their forest assets, creating organizations like Lyme Timber. And second, such organizations were increasingly using what are known as conservation easements, which constrain the development rights on a piece of land in exchange for some kind of subsidy.

Finally, Michael and Peter discuss the role that carbon markets and specifically carbon offsets are playing in the forest sector. Carbon offsets are a kind of payment for ecosystem service that are often integrated into the regulatory regime of a carbon market, but the voluntary  offset space is now growing rapidly as well.

Stefan Partelow speaks with Elke Kellner and Andreas Thiel on topics related to polycentricity, linked to the upcoming International Association for the Study of the Commons virtual conference on Polycentricity May 17-19, 2021. You can find more information about the conference and other IASC events on their website iasc-commons.org/.

Polycentricity conference:

https://2021polycentricity.iasc-commons.org/

Elke Kellner is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research in Switzerland.

https://www.wsl.ch/en/employees/kellner.html

Andreas Thiel is a professor of International Agricultural Policy and Environmental Governance at the University of Kassel in Germany.

https://www.uni-kassel.de/fb11agrar/fachgebiete-/-einrichtungen/internationale-agrarpolitik-und-umweltgovernance/team/prof-dr-andreas-thiel

 

www.incommonpodcast.org

 

In this episode, Michael speaks with Victoria Bikowski, a PhD student in the Department of Politics at York University in Toronto, Canada, and a consultant for Suslop Incorporated, a consulting firm that specializes in sustainability and community development. The conversation primarily focuses on the main topic of Victoria’s PhD dissertation: the duty to consult, or the obligation held by provincial governments and the Federal Canadian Government to consult with indigenous peoples about the potential consequences of government-supported projects, such as natural resource development. Victoria’s primary question that she is addressing is about the effects that consultation processes have on the uncertainties that each of the groups involved faces. Victoria also talks about her role as a consultant for Suslop Incorporated, and how she navigates her dual role as an academic and a practitioner.

IJC#10: Picking a bone with Elinor Ostrom? A conversation with Landon Yoder & Courtney Hammond Wagner

Listen to a conversation that Frank van Laerhoven had with Landon Yoder and Courtney Hammond Wagner.

Together with Kira Sullivan-Wiley and Gemma Smith, Landon and Courtney co-authored a recent IJC publication entitled The Promise of Collective Action for Large-Scale Commons Dilemmas: Reflections on Common-Pool-Resource Theory, an article that reflects on how to apply Ostrom’s design principles to larger-scale and more complex cases than the commons cases that we typically read about.

Their proposition is that there is an over-emphasis on using Ostrom’s design principles diagnostically. They argue that as the environmental challenges that we face today differ from the ones that the design principles were arguably developed for, we need more attention for building theoretical understanding of how collective action can contribute to solving larger-scale challenges where many problems intersect.  

Landon is affiliated with the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) at Indiana University, Bloomington. He holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Geography from that same university. His work combines both social and natural science data and spatial analysis to examine how biophysical conditions, social dynamics, and institutional arrangements jointly influence environmental change.

Courtney received a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont, and worked as a postdoctoral scholar in sustainable groundwater at Stanford. She now works for the United States  Department of Agriculture (USDA). Courtney’s research broadly aims to understand how we design incentives, rules and policies to collectively change behavior in water resource dilemmas to improve community well-being and ecological outcomes.

In case you want to learn more about topics akin to the topic discussed in this episode, may we suggest you check out some of the other titles in the International Journal of the Commons that also look at, for example:

• Orazgaliyev, S., & Araral, E. (2019). Conflict and cooperation in global commons: Theory and evidence from the Caspian Sea. International Journal of the Commons, 13(2).
• Paavola, J. (2008). Governing atmospheric sinks: the architecture of entitlements in the global commons. International Journal of the Commons, 2(2).
• Stern, P. (2011). Design principles for global commons: Natural resources and emerging technologies. International Journal of the Commons, 5(2).

And of course, you should check out the special issue introducing the Social-ecological systems meta-analysis database (SESMAD) project, put together by Michael Cox. This project is guided by the following research question: can the variables found to be important in explaining outcomes on small-scale systems be scaled up to explain outcomes in large-scale environmental governance?

In this episode, Divya interviews Usman Ashraf, a PhD student at the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Sciences at the University of Helsinki. His research focuses on forest governance and the complexities of the implementation of development policies in Pakistan. This discussion centers around Usman’s report on Pakistan’s ambitious "10 Billion Tree Tsunami" project, titled "Participation and Exclusion in a Mega-Tree Planting Project in Pakistan." The conversation explores how this massive reforestation initiative, aimed at combating climate change, has inadvertently disrupted the lives and livelihoods of the nomadic herder communities in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Usman explains how the long-standing relationship between Pashtun landowners and the nomadic goat-herding communities has been disturbed by government incentives to plant trees, fundamentally altering these traditional dynamics. This episode goes beyond academic discussion to provide a deep dive into the real-world implications of climate mitigation projects on marginalized communities. Usman’s ethnographic insights reveal how large-scale plantation projects, often driven by political motives, can have significant ecological, social, and economic consequences.

Overall, the conversation highlights the complexities of such initiatives in the Global South, emphasizing the need to consider both ecological and socio-economic factors to ensure that development projects are genuinely sustainable and equitable.

In this episode, Michael speaks with Stephen Posner, the Director of Pathways to Planetary Health at the Garrison Institute. The Garrison Institute is located in Garrison, New York along the Hudson River. Its mission is to apply the skills and wisdom cultivated through contemplative practice, together with the insights emerging from science, to today’s urgent social and environmental challenges, leveraging transformational change and helping build a more compassionate, resilient future.

Stephen obtained his PhD in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont in 2015, and has maintained an active research program that among things has focused on the role of boundary spanners, or organizations that are able to bridge gaps between groups and perspectives. Stephen’s answer to the question, what makes a good boundary spanner, emphasizes the importance of what he calls “self attention work” and developing a self-awareness of the reasons behind one’s own actions. Stephen also speaks about the importance of contemplative practice which is a major theme of the Garrison institute, and the importance of combining contemplation with action.

 

References:

Posner, S., Fenichel E.P., McCauley, D.J., et al. 2020. Boundary spanning among research and policy communities to address the emerging industrial revolution in the ocean. Environmental Science and Policy 104: 73-81.

Neal, J., Posner, S., Brutzman, B. 2021. Understanding brokers, intermediaries, and boundary spanners: a multi-sectoral review of strategies, skills, and outcomes. Evidence & Policy.

Stephen’s recent blog entry on combining inner and outer change: https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/blog/integrating-inner-and-outer-systems-change/

Metamorphosis event page: garrisonmetamorphosis.org

In this episode, Michael speaks with Lance Robinson, a Research Scientist studying Human Dimensions of Sustainable Resource Development at the Center for Northern Forest Ecosystem Research in Ontario, Canada. Lance has studied rangelands as social-ecological systems for many years, and has contributed to an alternative way of viewing them that departs from some of the traditional assumptions about commons and governance. In this conversation, Michael and Lance make specific reference to the design principles for community-based resource management developed by Elinor Ostrom in her famous book, Governing the Commons. Much of the conversation has to do with Ostrom’s first principle, which stipulated that communities are aided by boundaries that delineate who is and who isn’t a community member, and where the community’s resources are. Lance’s work unpacks the importance of boundaries in part through what he calls a complex landscape mosaic, which reflects the fact that in real systems, particularly in rangelands, there are many overlapping and shifting boundaries that are designed to help resource users adapt to resource scarcity, not to prevent the overuse of the commons, which is how they are usually interpreted.

This conversation builds on a previous interview with Mark Moritz on pastoralists and open property, and you should check that interview out as well if this one interests you.

 

References:

https://landscapewanderer.link/

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lance-Robinson

Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.

Schlager, Edella, and Elinor Ostrom. 1992. “Property-Rights Regimes and Natural Resources: A Conceptual Analysis.” Land Economics 68 (3): 249–62.

Robinson, Lance W., and Fikret Berkes. 2010. “Applying Resilience Thinking to Questions of Policy for Pastoralist Systems: Lessons from the Gabra of Northern Kenya.” Human Ecology 38 (3): 335–50. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-010-9327-1.

Robinson, Lance W. 2019. “Open Property and Complex Mosaics: Variants in Tenure Regimes across Pastoralist Social-Ecological Systems” 13 (1): 804.

In this episode, Hita speaks with Dr. Sarah Bezan who is a scholar of environmental humanities currently employed as a Lecturer in Literature and the Environment at the Radical Humanities Laboratory at University College Cork in Ireland. Previously she was a post-doctoral Research Associate at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity in The University of York in the United Kingdom. In this conversation, they chat about how participating in a paleo dig and uncovering a Mosasaur skeleton sparked in her a curiosity that led to her current engagement with making sense of extinction. They speak about artistic representations of extinct animals such as Harri Kallio’s representations of the dodo bird on an island in Mauritius or Mark Dion’s Ichthyosaur installation, and how they manipulate imaginaries surrounding the temporal and spatial boundaries of the extinct species. In describing these imaginaries, they discuss the idea of animal atopias, a term she coined to refer to those placeless places surrounding extinction, where the animal exists not on a spatially defined space but a constructed one, evoking a nostalgia for what once was. They discuss about Sarah’s experiences on the Galapagos Islands where she studied the taxidermic specimen of Lonesome George, the last representative of the Pinta island tortoises and her observation that the extinct body is essentially an exploded one raising questions about what it means to be the last representative of a species and the responsibility that death places upon such individuals. They reflect upon how practices of taxidermy and museum curatorship are essentially performative, designed to evoke a specific emotion or knowledge, rendering them hyper visible, while subsuming others. They discuss de-extinction projects such as the Jurassic World like attempts at reviving the woolly mammoth or even theoretical ideas of re-creating Neanderthals as proposed by George Church are all ways in which we attempt to revive prehistoric fantasies of the human – a fantasy nevertheless that is separate from the idea of the modern human. The conversation concludes with some reflections on interdisciplinary research and the responsibility that early career scholars are placed with when attempting to straddle multiple schools of thought.

Sarah’s personal website: https://www.sarahbezan.com/

Some of the references we cite during the conversation are listed below:

1. “Dodo Birds and the Anthropogenic Wonderlands of Harri Kallio.” Parallax, 25, no. 4, 2019: 427-445. (*To be reprinted as a foreword to Harri Kallio, The Dodo and Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters, 2nd Edition. Stockport, UK: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2023).
2. “The Endling Taxidermy of Lonesome George: Iconographies of Extinction at the End of the Line.” Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, vol. 27, no. 2, 2019, pp. 211-238. Co-Edited by Sarah Bezan and Susan McHugh.
3. “A Darwinism of the Muck and Mire: Decomposing Eco- and Zoopoetics in Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s decomp.” In Texts, Animals, Environments: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics. Ed. Roland Borgards, Catrin Gersdof, Frederike Middelhoff, and Sebastian Schönbeck. Freiburg: Rombach Verlag “Cultural Animal Studies Series,” 2019, 241-253.
4. Animal Remains. Co-edited by Sarah Bezan and Robert McKay. Routledge Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture Series. London: Routledge, 2022.
5. “Taxidermic Forms and Fictions.” A special issue of Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, 27, no. 2, 2019, pp. 131-138. Co-Edited by Sarah Bezan and Susan McHugh, Johns Hopkins University Press.
6. Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
7. Jørgensen, Dolly. “Endling, the Power of the Last in an Extinction-Prone World.” Environmental Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2017): 119–38.

 

In this end-of-the-year episode, Courtney, Mike, Michael and Stefan sat down to recap the year, talking about their favorite reads and favorite listens, fieldwork done and not done, and interesting work done on non-traditional commons.

References:

Chambers, J. M., et al. (2021). Six modes of co-production for sustainability. Nature Sustainability, 4(11), 983–996.

Christakis, N. A. (2019). Blueprint: The evolutionary origins of a good society. Hachette UK.

Epstein, D. (2019). Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Penguin Random House.

Freeth, R., and Caniglia, G. (2020). Learning to collaborate while collaborating: advancing interdisciplinary sustainability research. Sustainability Science, 15(1), 247–261.

Gorski, P. S. (2013). “What is Critical Realism? And Why Should You Care?” Contemporary Sociology, 42(5), 658–670.

Gottlieb, L. (2019). Maybe you should talk to someone. Manjul Publishing.

Kearns, F. (2021). Getting to the Heart of Science Communication: A Guide to Effective Engagement. Island Press.

Mott, J. (2021). Hell of a Book: A Novel. Penguin.

York, A. M., et al. (2021). Integrating institutional approaches and decision science to address climate change: a multi-level collective action research agenda. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 52, 19–26.

Podcasts:

Sam Harris:

https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/270-what-have-we-learned-from-the-pandemic

https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/269-deep-time

Esther Perel: https://www.estherperel.com/podcast

Wall Street Journal about uBiome: https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/what-went-wrong-at-ubiome-part-1/8b0717aa-1c66-4524-b47f-0cd3a399fcae

In this episode Michael speaks with Priya Shyamsundar, lead economist at the Nature Conservancy. Priya speaks about her career trajectory that led her to the Nature Conservancy, and about her current position. They discuss the history of economics and social science at the Nature Conservancy and in Conservation more broadly, and Priya describes the increasing appreciation for the role that humans play in conservation that has occurred across many conservation organizations, but also that there remains a dominance of natural sciences simply in terms of how many natural scientists vs. social scientists are employed at the Nature Conservancy. 

Michael and Priya also talk about a specific project that Priya has been involved in called the Prana (“breath”) project, dealing with agricultural residue management in rural India. There, the massive burning of residues after harvest each fall has created large-scale smoke and air pollution problems. Priya, along with a previous guest of the podcast, JT Erbaugh, have been working with local partners in India to conduct focus groups and a baseline survey to understand the preferences of local farmers for how best to address this issue. The interview concludes with a discussion of the factors that make it more or less likely for farmers to adopt new farming strategies, and Priya mentions a finding that the most significant factor in affecting whether or not a farmer adopts a new technique is whether people in their social network have adopted it as well. Just like many social behaviors, adoption can be contagious.

References:

Cool green science website that Priya mentions: https://blog.nature.org/science/

In this episode, Michael speaks with one of his intellectual heroes, Dr. Steve Lansing. Steve is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and the Vienna Complexity Hub, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, and a senior research fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Steve and Michael talk about Steve’s work with the Balinese Subak irrigation communities, including his understanding of their water use and management practices that are mediated by their water-based religion. Steve also describes the effects that green revolution techniques and technologies had on the Subaks, how local actors responded to this disturbances to their traditions, and what role Steve himself played in these responses. Finally, Steve talks about his more recent work in Bali, which includes an experiment to examine whether the Subak farmers can save water by flooding their paddies less, and thereby reduce methane emissions while also producing more rice.

Steve’s website: http://www.slansing.org/

 

References:

Lansing, J. S. 2012. Perfect order: Recognizing complexity in Bali. Princeton University Press.

Lansing, S. 1991. Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali. Princeton University Press.

Lansing, J. S., N. N. Chung, L. Y. Chew, and G. S. Jacobs. 2021. Averting evolutionary suicide from the tragedy of the commons. International journal of the commons 15(1):414.

In this episode Hita and Michael spoke with Dustin Garrick who is an Associate Professor at the School of Environment, Resources, and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo, Canada and a research fellow at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. We discussed how his passion for rivers led Dustin to move between theory and practice to understand the scope - and limits - of water markets as part of struggles toward more sustainable water management.  Starting in the Colorado and Columbia Rivers of North America, Dustin’s work has led to a broader intellectual project to examine the institutional diversity and evolution of water markets, working with a network of partners across the world, to understand whether and under which conditions, different resource users and communities can “use markets without being abused by them”.  We also spoke about the critiques of some predominant market based approaches to natural resource governance such as cap-and-trade systems and more free market environmentalism. . We touched upon some of his more recent work on informal water markets, and his growing interest in collective action across the rural-urban divide, which led to the development of a global database on rural-urban water conflict and cooperation that he has developed along with some of his colleagues. Dustin also reflected upon his engagement with large international development organisations such as the World Bank, OECD and global conservation organisations. He stressed that  these organisations are not monolithic entities. t  They are composed of groups of people  with varied perspectives, interests and expertise, including many who share a focus on political economy and informality. Yet, these organisations also face practical and political constraints,  that can lead to panacea thinking and otherwise limit the range of institutions and interests considered. We ended with a note on the importance of developing and diversifying one’s mentoring networks, while forging our own academic and non-academic pathways and trajectories. Dustin is currently involved in a book project on “Uncommon Markets”, the details of which may be found here: https://www.aaas.org/news/aaas-leshner-fellow-dustin-garrick-launches-uncommon-markets-book-project

Dustin’s institutional website: https://uwaterloo.ca/environment-resources-and-sustainability/people-profiles/dustin-garrick

Some of the references we discuss in this interview are listed below: 

• Neuman, Janet C., The Good, the Bad, the Ugly: The First Ten Years of the Oregon Water Trust. Nebraska Law Review, Vol. 83, pp. 432-484, 2004, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=985401
• Garrick, D. E. (2015). Water allocation in rivers under pressure: Water trading, transaction costs and transboundary governance in the Western US and Australia. Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Garrick, D., O’Donnell, E., Damania, R., Moore, S., Brozović, N., Iseman, T. 2019. Informal water markets in an urbanising world: some unanswered questions. © World Bank. 
•  Garrick, Dustin, Lucia De Stefano, Laura Turley, Isabel Jorgensen, Ismael Aguilar-Barajas, Barbara Schreiner, Renata de Souza Leão, Erin O’Donnell, and Avril Horne. 2019. “Dividing the Water, Sharing the Benefits: Lessons from Rural-to-Urban Water Reallocation.” World Bank, Washington, DC.
• Williamson, E.O. 1981 “The Economics of Organization: The Transaction Cost Approach.” American Journal of Sociology 87( 3): 548–77. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2778934.
• Marshall, G.R. 2005. Economics for Collaborative Environmental Management: Renegotiating the Commons. London: Earthscan Publications.
• Ostrom, E. 2009. Understanding institutional diversity. In Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton university press.
• North, D.C., 1991. Institutions, ideology, and economic performance. Cato Journal, 11: 477.
• Ostrom, E.E., Dietz, T.E., Dolšak, N.E., Stern, P.C., Stonich, S.E. and Weber, E.U., 2002. The drama of the commons. National Academy Press.
• Scott, J.C., 2008. Seeing like a state. In Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press.

In this episode Michael speaks with Dr. Noa Kekuewa Lincoln, a professor in the department of tropical plant and soil sciences at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Noa’s specialty areas include biogeochemistry, ethnography, and archaeology of traditional farming methods. Noa tells Michael about his work on Hawaiian farming systems and the Hawaiian concept of Kuleana as a combination of both a right to and respect for the environment. Noa also talks about the intrinsic power of stories and the importance of interdisciplinary work in enabling us to tell compelling stories about our relationship with the environment.

 

References and resource:

Another interview with Noa on Science Friday: https://www.sciencefriday.com/person/noa-kekuewa-lincoln/

Lincoln, N. K., Rossen, J., Vitousek, P., Kahoonei, J., Shapiro, D., Kalawe, K., Pai, M., Marshall, K., & Meheula, K. (2018). Restoration of ‘Āina Malo‘o on Hawai‘i Island: Expanding Biocultural Relationships. Sustainability: Science Practice and Policy, 10(11), 3985. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10113985

Lincoln, N. K., & Ardoin, N. M. (2016). Cultivating values: environmental values and sense of place as correlates of sustainable agricultural practices. Agriculture and Human Values, 33(2), 389–401. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-015-9613-z

This insight episode comes from full episode seventy-one with Bridie McGreavy.

Bridie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Maine, Orono.

Bridie talks with Michael and special guest Karen Bieluch, a prior colleague of his at Dartmouth College and current colleague of Bridie at the University of Maine, about the importance of indigenous knowledge and relationships with the land in understanding and protecting shellfish fisheries and local communities in Maine.

Bridie's website: https://bmcgreavy.org

In Common Website: https://www.incommonpodcast.org 

Connect with us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/InCommonPod

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/incommonpodcast 

In this episode Hita speaks with her colleague, Prof. AbdouMaliq Simone, a Senior Professorial fellow at the Urban Institute of The University of Sheffield. They speak of Maliq’s early life in pre-independence Sierra Leone and its influence on his thinking and his subsequent move from Freetown to Chicago, alongside his shift from pursuing psychology to engaging in developmental practice. Maliq mentions in the interview that his focus on the urban was an organic one and which stemmed from his work in psychology, the developmental sector, as well as what he describes as a long foray into radical politics. They discuss how his interpretation of the urban seeks to explain gaps in conventional definitions of what the urban means, particularly from the perspective of African cities where he noticed that there was a way in which urban economies were being elaborated to address a population that was being urbanized through their own efforts to provide for each other – and oftentimes in situations that were new to them.

They speak about Blackness and Black thought, of the field known as Black studies and its slight parallels with African Studies. As an urbanist, Maliq has been particularly influenced by black notions of locality – the extended idea of the locality – rooted within particular histories of the predominantly US based plantation system. He speaks about how black inhabitants of a plantation had to within the contexts of their own subjugation, develop tools and techniques to realize a sense of locality that extended beyond the immediate physical space, and how this notion of an extended locality helped the emergence of processes sustaining a black collective life. They then discuss the limits of using black thought as a methodological approach –focusing on the caution one has to exercise so that the usage of these knowledge systems does not reinforce the horrific forms of subjugation that it emerged from.

They next discuss Maliq’s latest book The Surrounds, which refers to those relational, improvised and interstitial spaces which accompany the formal urban as we know it. We discussed the idea of the surrounds in the context of changing and reconfigured relationships people build with ecological commons – especially in contexts where their access to formerly important spaces becomes restricted because of other urban agendas. They discuss how the book contrasts ideas of home and work, especially from the perspective of marginalized communities for whom the home is not a place of settlement – rather it is a place of transient thinking; for whom work may not represent stability, but rather a confinement that restricts their ability to engage with the city.

References

2022. Simone A.M. 2022. The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture. Duke University Press.
2023. Schmid C. and Brenner N. 2011. Planetary urbanization. Urban Constellations, 1st ed., Gandy, M. Eds. Jovis-Verl: Berlin, Germany, pp.10-13.
2024. McKittrick K. 2020. Dear science and other stories. Duke University Press.

In this episode, Courtney speaks with Bill Blomquist, a Professor of Political Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and a fellow at the Ostrom Workshop. We explore Bill's ground-breaking and decade-spanning research into California groundwater governance. We talk about Bill's work tracking the evolution of groundwater policy and institutions, the unique theoretical insights we can learn about natural resource governance from California's most recent groundwater experiment, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, and finally we end with some reflections on Bill's time working with the Ostrom Workshop.   If you'd like to dig a little deeper into the content Bill discusses in this podcast, here are a few resources:

 

The Commons Governance program at the Ostrom Workshop: https://ostromworkshop.indiana.edu/research/commons/index.html   The special issue of Society and Natural Resources on the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, featuring a few articles by Bill: https://t.co/66njZziLk6?amp=1   NSF-funded project led by Anita Milman at UMass Amherst on California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act that Bill is a collaborator on. This project focuses on inter-agency coordination and Bill mentions it in the discussion in this podcast on mandated-coordination-vs-local-autonomy: https://watergovernance.umasscreate.net/groundwater-sustainability/sgma/

This ‘Insight’ episode is from full episode 37, where Michael and Stefan interview Jessica Cockburn.

Jessica is a Lecturer in Environmental Science at Rhodes University in South Africa. Jessica identifies as a "pracademic" who often works with local partners to explore how actors across a variety of contexts interact to address sustainability challenges. Her work is highly collaborative. Among the groups she engages with is the Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS): https://pecs-science.org/.

https://www.ru.ac.za/environmentalscience/staff/staffacademic/jessicacockburn/

In this clip, Jessica’s explains why she draws a critical realism approach, and how that is positioned between positivist and constructivist paradigms.

Jessica's personal website: https://sites.google.com/view/jesscockburn/home

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jess_cockburn

In this episode, Hita, Maria and Dane were joined by Georgina Cundill Kemp, Senior Program Specialist at the ‎International Development Research Centre in Canada, and Praneeta Mudaliar, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Science at Ithaca College. We talked about their journeys towards interdisciplinary research, then discussed building interdisciplinary collaborations and the role of trust in collaborative research. We ended by hearing about their epic fails.

Georgina’s website: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=YlMUPQIAAAAJ&hl 

Praneeta’s website: https://www.ithaca.edu/faculty/pmudliar

This insight episode comes from full episode eighty-two with Daniel Decaro.

Daniel is an associate professor at the University of Louisville with a joint appointment in the Department of Urban and Public Affairs and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

Daniel speaks with Michael about the basics of self-determination theory, and what he would add to the theory to expand the definition of self-determination.

Daniel's website: https://louisville.edu/psychology/d-decaro

In this episode, Hita and Michael speak with Arati Kumar Rao who describes herself as a chronicler of landscapes - of both biodiversity as well as livelihoods using all the storytelling tools she has at her disposal - from photographs to writing to sketching. She is based out of Bengaluru, India.  We speak about her enduring love for literature, writing, photography, and drawing and how that love translated into the work she does today. We talk of some of the stories from her experiences of chronicling landscape change across India and elsewhere that have stayed with her, and given her a sense of hope or despair as she navigates her own personal identity against those of the people she talks about. We speak of a particular historically practised form of rainwater harvesting in the deep Thar desert - the Khadeen - that is over 700 years old, and is intimately connected to agrarian practices in the region. We discuss the need to break down silos that exist across different disciplines or practice and to speak both to and across the social as well as the scientific stories of a landscape and how they need to be inclusive of the people that live and experience those stories in their daily lives. We speak about feeling the land with all of one’s senses and how that is different from zooming across it in a vehicle, linking those ideas to the privilege that comes from being an ‘other’ who studies people and livelihoods with the freedom of leaving that landscape and going back to the privilege we came from. Yet with the notion that we are not separate from what’s happening around us. We end with a discussion on the multilayered and deep rooted patriarchy that a woman encounters when leading a traveller’s lifestyle, both from within the communities she engages with, as well as the community she comes back to. 

 

Arati’s website: https://www.aratikumarrao.com/about

 

In Arati’s own words, here is the story of the Khadeen: https://www.peepli.org/stories/miracle-of-sky-river/

 

She is also to found documenting stories of change on her Instagram handle: @aratikumarrao

Maria Claudia Lopez and Frank van Laerhoven are speaking with Beril Ocaklı.

Beril co-authored a recent contribution to the International Journal of the Commons titled ‘Shades of Conflict in Kyrgyzstan: National Actor Perceptions and Behaviour in Mining’ with her colleagues Tobias Krueger and Jörg Niewöhner.

The episode starts with the proper pronunciation of Beril’s name, and wraps up with reflections on the importance of diversity in approaching the commons and commons scholarship. In between, the discussion gears around the article – the prequel, its message, and the sequel.

Beril Ocaklı is a doctoral researcher at IRI THESys. She holds a BA in International Economics from the Corvinus University of Budapest (2006) and a MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE) (2007). She has a track record of leading international transdisciplinary cooperation projects on behalf of the German Federal Government, EU and other multinational organizations in resource governance in Eurasia.

• To find more details on Beril and her work, her profile page at IRI THESys is a good place to start;
• To get a taste of some of Beril’s unsalted opinions we suggest you look her up on Twitter;
• To hear Beril talk some more about the topic of gold mining in Kyrgyzstan go to The Global Extractivisms and Alternatives Initiative (EXALT) Podcast Talk March 2021 and the Voices on Central Asia for her recent interview on politics of gold mining.

 

www.incommonpodcast.org

 

In this episode, Hita, Maria and Dane were joined by Nanda Wijermans, a Researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. We talked about Nanda’s journey towards interdisciplinary research, and then discussed the unique opportunities and challenges of working in an interdisciplinary environment, and how to design effective interdisciplinary environments. We ended by hearing about an epic fail.

 

Nanda’s website: https://www.nandawijermans.nl/ 

 

Dane’s website:

https://sustainability.asu.edu/person/dane-whittaker/

In this episode, Stefan speaks with Josephine Chambers. Josie is an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, situated within the Urban Futures Studio at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. Her research develops and examines approaches to questioning so-called ‘inevitable’ unjust futures and fostering collective imagination and agency towards more just and sustainable societies. She weaves together artistic, participatory, imaginative, decolonial concepts to collaboratively explore possibilities for transformative changes with diverse societal groups. 

 

In the podcast, they speak about two papers Josie and colleagues published analyzing co-production research, one titled ‘Six modes of co-production for sustainability’’ published in Nature Sustainability and the other titled ‘Co-productive agility and four collaborative pathways to

sustainability transformations’ published in Global Environmental Change. They also discuss the role of creativity in science, and how linking art, creativity and science has potential to extract pluralistic sustainability narratives for just futures. Josie also explains how she brings her knowledge and passion for co-production and creativity into the classroom to reshape learning and student engagement.

 

Six modes of co-production for sustainability

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00755-x?utm_campaign=related_content&utm_source=HEALTH&utm_medium=communities

 

Co-productive agility and four collaborative pathways to sustainability transformations https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378021002016

 

Josie’s ‘Urban Pulses’ blog

https://www.uu.nl/en/research/urban-futures-studio/initiatives/blog-utopian-pulses

 

Josie’s ‘Map of Rural Utopias’

https://www.uu.nl/en/research/urban-futures-studio/initiatives/techniques-of-futuring-a-mixed-classroom-with-policymakers/rural-utopias

 

In this episode, Michael speaks with Mike Albertus, associate professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. They talk about Mike’s most recent book, Property Without Rights: Origins and Consequences of the Property Rights Gap. In the book, Mike is studying the results of agrarian reforms in Latin America, which are designed to redistribute land to rural peasants. Many of these reforms have left  a “gap”, or a lack of formalization, defensibility, and alienability of these new rural land rights. Mike’s main thesis of the book is that this gap has persisted in large part because of strategic decisions by national governments to keep rural landowners dependent on the state for their livelihood. Mike and Michael discuss this thesis as well as several other related arguments in the book.

Mikes website: http://www.michaelalbertus.com/

References:

Albertus, M. 2021. Property without Rights: Origins and Consequences of the Property Rights Gap. Cambridge University Press.

In this Commoning episode, Courtney speaks to Edella Schlager, Tomás Olivier, and Ruth Meinzen Dick on the Water Commons. Edella, Tomás and Ruth were part of the organizing team for the IASC 2021 Virtual Water Commons conference held in May. Edella Schlager is the Director of the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. Tomás Olivier is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration in the School of Public Administration at Florida Atlantic University. Finally, Ruth Meinzen Dick is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. In this conversation, we run the gamut on water commons, discussing Ruth, Tomás and Edella's take on the state of water commons research, core canonical topics, such as collective action in governance of water that remains of top relevance today, and new directions, such as the need for greater theorizing on complexity and coordination around collective action in water commons. We also get some insights from the field, drawing on Edella and Tomás research linking institutions and behavior in the New York City watershed, Tomás insights from work in Argentina and Ruth's recent work on irrigation games for social learning in India.   You can find more about the Water commons Conference and other IASC events on their website: https://iasc-commons.org/    Here are a couple of the publications that we reference in the conversation: Ruth Meinzen-Dick's paper on property rights and collective action in irrigation : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377414000894 Edella Schlager and Tomás Olivier's paper on integrating institutional analysis and behavior: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/psj.12429?casa_token=qby9ACV3S74AAAAA:XyZjtK25Sat87uRHnJ3Uctwl3wVNrFLdN50vCAlkwgWlkCGg2IDCouQ8yp3C3UH_vxYREuUAkG0I   For more information about our guests, you can check out their webpages: Ruth Meinzen-Dick: https://www.ifpri.org/profile/ruth-meinzen-dick Tomás Olivier: https://www.fau.edu/artsandletters/public-administration/people/olivier/ Edella Schlager: https://sgpp.arizona.edu/people/edella-schlager

In this episode, Stefan spoke with Graeme Cumming.  Graeme is a Professor at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia and the Director of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. Graeme has a wide range of interests centering around understanding spatial aspects of ecology and the relevance of scale in ecosystem and social-ecological system function and resilience. He is also interested in the applications of landscape ecology and complexity theory to conservation and the sustainable management of natural resources. 

In the conversation, they discuss his extensive international experience, and the topics he has focused on throughout his career, including his upbringing in Zimbabwe. We discuss how theory is often lacking in applied research, and how building theory, particularly at the relevant scales, is an important challenge in his research program. We close the interview with his vision for examining what is beyond resilience, and the theoretical ideas he is interested in over the coming years.

Link to Post-Ostrom agenda paper:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1877343520300129

Link to scale mismatch on GBR paper:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332220303511

University page

https://www.coralcoe.org.au/person/gscumming

Google Scholar page

 

 

www.incommonpodcast.org

 

Twitter: @incommonpod

In this episode, Hita spoke with Aditya Ramesh, Presidential Fellow of Environmental History at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. They spoke about disease ecologies, the epistemes of disease, and its links with urban planning. In the process they also discussed the changing ideas of what constitutes an archive and what that means for upcoming scholars who engage with environmental history. 

Aditya’s website: https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/aditya.ramesh.html

In this episode, Michael speaks with Dr. Esther Zeledon. Esther is a senior development advisor, former diplomat, President and founder of Optimax International and @be.act.change. Under these capacities, Esther serves as a senior consultant to international agencies, serves on NGO boards and coaches individuals and businesses.

During the interview, Esther talks about her experiences working in the international development space, particularly for USAID, where she worked for ten years. Esther describes the importance of genuine listening in this work, and of having a sense of one’s mission, purpose and vision. She argues that too often, practitioners view development projects as checkboxes due to time and resource constraints, experience burnout due to a lack of intrinsic engagement that fulfills their values, and overly exert their own expertise to establish an authoritative identity in their work. These dynamics can lead to projects that don’t meet or fit with local needs and goals, as has been often documented in the literature on international development. Esther also talks about how to make a transition to more locally-driven development in the context of an overall top-down framework that requires that development professionals be accountable to funders. This represents an ongoing tension for practitioners who ascribe to the localization movement.

In this episode, Michael and Hita speak with David Bollier. David is an author, activist, blogger and consultant who spends a lot of time exploring the commons as a new paradigm of economics, politics and culture. In 2010, David co-founded the Commons Strategies Group, a consulting project that works to promote the commons internationally. More recently, he became the Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

David has authored and co-authored many books, and we focus in particular on his book Free, Fair, and Alive: the Insurgent Power of the Commons, which he co-autherd with the late Silka Helfrich. Much of this book and our conversation focus on the idea of commoning. This is a different take on the commons, think about it less as a physical description of the environment and more about the relationships that we have with each other and the environment. It is also seen as a response to historic enclosures of the commons and a western emphasis on governance and property as inherently exclusionary practices. This approach is an important alternative to the dominant way in which the commons are thought about.

 

David’s website: http://www.bollier.org/

 

References:

Bollier, D., and S. Helfrich. 2019. Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons. New Society Publishers.

This insight episode comes from full episode eighty-eight with Achim Schluter.

Achim is a Professor Social Systems and Ecological Economics at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, as well as the Social Science Department leader and head of the Institutional and Behavioral Economics working group at the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research.

Achim talks with Stefan about the privatization of the ocean, specifically thinking about both the problems it creates and the potential to use it as a method of ensuring the rights of local actors and long-term sustainability. 

Achim's Institutional Webpage: https://www.leibniz-zmt.de/en/marine-tropics-research/who-we-are/achim-schlueter-en.html 

Achim's Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=L5ONyegAAAAJ&hl=de 

In this episode Michael spoke with Brent Loken, a Global Food Lead Scientist at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Together they discussed Brent's realization that conservation ultimately needs to engage with how we meet peoples' needs, and that food is at the center of this. After describing the path he has taken leading up to his current position, Brent talked about his work at the WWF to promote a global transformation in our food system.

Brent's information:

Website: https://www.worldwildlife.org/experts/brent-loken

Twitter: @brentloken

Email: brent.loken@wwf.org

Link to a WWF project on Planet-based diets that Brent is involved in: 

https://planetbaseddiets.panda.org/

 

In this episode, Michael speaks with Erik Thulin, Behavioral Science Director at Rare, an NGO dedicated to employing behavioral and social change for the benefit of the environment. Erik was a previous guest on this podcast during one of our episodes associated with a virtual conference of the international association for the study of the commons.

Erik talks to Michael about his role at Rare and several topics related to it. These included the relationship between applied conservation work and behavioral science and research in academia, the role and challenges of behaviorally-oriented policy panaceas, Erik's own findings on the importance of social influence in directing behavior, and the role that emotions play in behavior change.

Note: Erik mentions a program called “Make It Personal”. Since recording that program changed its name to Climate Culture.

Erik’s website: https://rare.org/person/erik-thulin/

 

References:

Brown, P. C., H. L. Roediger, and M. A. McDaniel. 2014. Make It Stick. Harvard University Press.

Heller, K., M. Berger, A. Gagern, A. Rakhimov, J. Thomas, and E. Thulin. 2021. Six behaviors policymakers should promote to mitigate climate change. Behavioral science & policy 7(2):63–73.

Henrich, J., R. Boyd, S. Bowles, C. Camerer, E. Fehr, H. Gintis, and R. McElreath. 2001. In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies. The American economic review 91(2):73–78.

Henrich, J. 2015. The secret of our success: how culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.

Henrich, J. 2020. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Rakhimov, A., and E. Thulin. 2020, December. Knowing Behavior Matters Doesn’t Hurt: The Effect of Individual Climate Behavior Messaging on Green Policy Support. https://psyarxiv.com/hu24g/

Richerson, P. J., R. Boyd, and B. Paciotti. 2002. An evolutionary theory of commons management. Pages 403–442 in Elinor Ostrom, Thomas Dietz, Nives Dolšak, Paul C. Stern, Susan Stonich, Elke U. Weber, editors. The drama of the commons. The National Academies Press.

Thaler, R. H., and C. R. Sunstein. 2009. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Penguin.

Thulin, E., and A. Rakhimov. 2019, November. Helping the Climate Because Others Do: An Exploratory Analysis of the Psychological Predictors of Intention to Perform High Impact Pro-Environmental Behaviors. https://psyarxiv.com/kah7s/

Williamson, K., and E. Thulin. 2021. Leveraging emotion-behavior pathways to support environmental behavior change. https://psyarxiv.com/wtms9/

Thulin, E. 2020. Cooperative Behavior Adoption Guide: Applying Behavior-Centered Design to Solve Cooperative Dilemmas.  Arlington, VA: Rare. 

https://www.jasoncollins.blog/avoiding-trite-lists-of-biases-and-pictures-of-human-brains-on-powerpoint-slides/

In this IJC episode, Frank van Laerhoven has a conversation with Jim Sinner.

 

Together with Marc Tadaki, Edward Challies, Margaret Kilvington, Paratene Tane, and Christina Robb, Jim co-authored a recent IJC publication entitled Crafting Collective Management Institutions in Messy Real-World Settings: A Call for Action Research.

The article deals with how we can give guidance to prospective, or would-be institutional crafters and collective management enablers. And in order to address that question the researchers apply an explicit action research approach with commoners not as subjects or respondents but as co-researchers.

In the conversation we discuss some of the codes of conduct for commons researchers that are based on Jim’s research, such the need to get alongside people on the ground, to engage with social identities, and to put social justice at the center of what we do.

Jim’s work aligns with other work that we have published in the International Journal of the Commons, work that engages with critical institutionalism, for example. If this topic interests you, you may want to check out the following titles, also:

• Cleaver, F., & De Koning, J. (2015). Furthering critical institutionalism. International Journal of the Commons, 9(1).
• Funder, M., & Marani, M. (2015). Local bureaucrats as bricoleurs. The everyday implementation practices of county environment officers in rural Kenya. International Journal of the Commons, 9(1).
• Ingram, V., Ros-Tonen, M., & Dietz, T. (2015). A fine mess: Bricolaged forest governance in Cameroon. International Journal of the Commons, 9(1).
• Jones, S. (2015). Bridging political economy analysis and critical institutionalism: an approach to help analyse institutional change for rural water services. International Journal of the Commons, 9(1).
• Marin, A., & Bjørklund, I. (2015). A tragedy of errors? Institutional dynamics and land tenure in Finnmark, Norway. International Journal of the Commons, 9(1).
• Saunders, F. (2014). The promise of common pool resource theory and the reality of commons projects. International Journal of the Commons, 8(2).
• Van der Kooij, S., Zwarteveen, M., & Kuper, M. (2015). The material of the social: the mutual shaping of institutions by irrigation technology and society in Seguia Khrichfa, Morocco. International Journal of the Commons, 9(1).
• Verzijl, A., & Dominguez, C. (2015). The powers of water-user associations: on multiplicity, fluidity, and durability in the Peruvian Andes. International Journal of the Commons, 9(1).

 

In this episode, Stefan speaks with Joshua Cinner.

Josh is a distinguished professor in the social sciences at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, and is one of world's leading researchers on human-environment interactions in fisheries, marine conservation and coral reef systems. His research brings together a wide range of social science disciplines including human geography, common property, anthropology, and conservation policy. He often works closely with ecologists on interdisciplinary research topics. Increasingly, his research is moving beyond the case study approach toward a ‘big picture’ comparative exploration of human-environment interactions. This includes work with coastal peoples in the Pacific Islands, South East Asia, East Africa, and the Caribbean, to better understand how socioeconomic factors influence the ways in which people use, perceive, and govern coral reefs.

In our conversation, Josh explains his origin story connecting to marine systems, his research on coral bright spots and ambitions to continue large scale comparative analyses of human-nature interactions in fisheries. He also explains his approach to collaborative project design and implementation, and how he navigates the social networks of science and science management.

 

Josh’s JCU page

https://research.jcu.edu.au/portfolio/joshua.cinner/

 

Josh’s Google Scholar page

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=pgldl5oAAAAJ&hl=en

 

Publication link: Bright spots on the world’s coral reefs

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18607

 

Publications link: 

Sixteen years of social and ecological dynamics reveal challenges and opportunities for adaptive management in sustaining the commons | PNAS

In this episode, Hita and Michael speak with noted Indian environmentalist Ashish Kothari, who works at the interface between development and environment and focuses particularly on radical alternatives to development discourses. Ashish is a familiar name to people working in the Indian environmental context as well as those who engage with degrowth, not least because of his strong involvement in grassroots environmental movements such as the Narmada Bachao Andolan in the country. He is one of founders of Kalpavriksh, a Non-Profit Organisation in India which deals with environmental and development issues. In addition, he wears many other hats – as an academic and teacher, as a member of international steering committees such as those of the World Commission on Protected Areas or the Convention on Biodiversity Alliance. He has also worked as a member of several Government of India committees including those responsible for assessing India’s Forest Rights Act and drafting the country’s National Wildlife Action Plan and Biodiversity Act. He is also the coordinator of Vikalp Sangam, a platform that brings together organisations and individuals who work on development alternatives across India. He is also one of the editors of the book Pluriverse: a post development dictionary.

In our conversation Ashish reflects upon the influence of his early childhood experiences with environmental activism – particularly protests against the shooting of the Great Indian Bustard by Saudi Arabian Princes and against tree felling in the Delhi Ridge Forest upon his engagement with environmental conservation. He asks the pertinent question: can wildlife conservation happen at the cost of human rights? We speak about the eternal debate of development vs the environment, and his conviction that the idea of development per se itself is deeply flawed. Instead, he says, what we need are different notions of well-being emerging from different parts of the world serving to replace the idea of development. We spoke about the dangers of viewing community led action as yet another panacea but also recognising the inherent strength present within them. We discuss moving beyond dichotomies of community vs government instead looking towards alternatives where we can enable communities to regain their balance in different ways. We reflect upon the importance of building and being part of networks that both keep you going but also stand ready to continue in your place, and how that very act of working together poses further challenges if one were to consider identity building, branding or even issues of satisfying personal egos. We end with some reflection on Ashish’s conceptualization of the term Eco Swarajya and the challenges associated with misappropriation of culturally or spiritually loaded terms.

Some of the initiatives that Ashish mentions during this interview are:

Vikalp Sangam: https://vikalpsangam.org/

Kalpavriksh: https://kalpavriksh.org/

Radical Ecological Democracy: https://radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/

Global Tapestry of Alternatives: https://www.globaltapestryofalternatives.org/

Pluriverse: a post development dictionary: https://www.ehu.eus/documents/6902252/12061123/Ashish+Kothari+et+al-Pluriverse+A+Post-Development+Dictionary-2019.pdf/c9f05ea0-d2e7-8874-d91c-09d11a4578a2

Ashish’s website and blog: https://ashishkothari.in/ ; https://ashishkothari51.blogspot.com/

This insight episode is taken from episode 46, where Michael spoke with Jon Parker. John is a sociologist of science and a program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) within its division of social and economic sciences.

John’s website and google scholar pages:

http://john-parker-wg6d.squarespace.com/

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=euuurksAAAAJ&hl=en

In this episode, Michael speaks with Mehana Blaich Vaughan, associate professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management in the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. Mehana is an environmental social scientist whose work focuses on indigenous and community-based natural resource management.

Michael asks Mehana about her book, Kaiaulu: Gathering Tides. In this book, Mehana describes the relationship between Hawaiian people and their land and water. Throughout this book Mehana describes how Hawaiians view nature as a partner rather than as a resource. The book is a guide to important Hawaiian concepts such as Kuleana, embodying the idea that access to the environment is partnered with obligations to it and to the one’s community. Mehana talks with Michael about this and other related terms that form a network of understanding for a worldview that is quite different from the dominant bureaucratized, westernized position. During their discussion, Mehana also talks about the land dispossession that Hawaiians have faced, and how some Hawaiian communities have been trying to reassert their environmental traditions in the context of Hawaiian state bureaucracy.

Mehana’s website:http://mehanavaughan.huiainamomona.org/

Website for Kipuka Kuleana: https://www.kipukakuleana.org/

References:

Vaughan, M. B. 2018. Kaiaulu: Gathering Tides. Oregon State University Press.

Diver, S., M. Vaughan, M. Baker-Médard, and H. Lukacs. 2019. Recognizing “reciprocal relations” to restore community access to land and water. International journal of the commons 13(1):400.

In this episode we all spoke with Frank van Laerhoven, a professor at Utrecht University and co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of the Commons, a new partner of the In Common podcast. We talked to Frank about his time working for the Food and Agriculture Organization and his transition to academia. Frank discussed his concerns about both professional arenas and the gap between them. Are we really making a difference, and if not, how does this relate to the incentives that so many commons scholars study and also face? We asked Frank about his leadership of the journal and how some of these concerns can be addressed.

Frank's website: https://www.uu.nl/medewerkers/FSJvanLaerhoven

International Journal of the Commons: https://www.thecommonsjournal.org/

 

 

In this episode, Michael talks with Marty Anderies, Professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University.

They discuss a book that Marty co-authored with Marco Janssen, a colleague of his at Arizona State, entitled Infrastructure for Sustainability. The book is designed to introduce readers to the work of Elinor “Lin” Ostrom and her colleagues on the role of institutions in shaping behavior. Ostrom pioneered the study of institutions, particularly in context of the self-governance of resource-dependent communities. Marty discusses Lin’s work and the role that she played in his career.

The book also introduces readers to the work of Buzz Holling and his colleagues on the resilience of complex systems. Resilience is an important boundary concept, being used by multiple fields to describe the ability of a system to “bounce back” and sustain itself in a particular regime or state. It is related to but distinct from the idea of robustness, which relates the ability to maintain a desired system function in the face of disturbance and uncertainty. In the last half of the conversation, Michael and Marty try to unpack what these terms mean and how they can and should be used to understand our relationships with each other and the natural environment.

Finally, Marty also talks about the importance of the term infrastructure, which is similar to but different from the idea of capital as many people use it. In describing his preference for infrastructure, Marty has provided this quotation from Bowles and Gintis (2005) that has influenced his thinking:

"Perhaps social capital, like Voltaire’s God, would have to have been invented had it not existed. It may even be a good idea. It is not a good term. Capital refers to a thing that can be owned—even a social isolate like Robinson Crusoe had an axe and a fishing net. By contrast, the attributes said to make up social capital describe relationships among people. ‘‘Community’’ better captures the aspects of good governance that explain social capital’s popularity, as it focuses attention on what groups do rather than what people own" (Bowles and Gintis, 2005, p. 381).

References:

Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (2005). Social capital, moral sentiments, and community governance.  In Gintis, H., Bowles, S., Boyd, R., and Fehr, E., eds. Moral sentiments and material interests: The foundations of cooperation in economic life. Vol. 6. MIT press.

Janssen, M., and Anderies, J.M. 2023. Infrastructure for Sustainability.  https://pressbooks.pub/cisi/

In this episode, Stefan interviews Emily Boyd, an in-person interview recorded back in January 2020.

Emily is Director of Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies and Professor in Sustainability Science. She is a leading social scientist with a background in international development, environment and climate change, with a focus on the interdisciplinary nexus of poverty, livelihoods and resilience in relation to global environmental change. Emily is currently leading work on undesirable resilience, politics of loss and damage and intersectionality in societal transitions, including on transformations under climate change. 

Emily Boyd is also an author for the IPCC, IPBES, and UKCCRA and is an Earth System Governance Senior Fellow. 

 

https://www.lucsus.lu.se/emily-boyd

 

https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=CatOY9oAAAAJ&hl=de&oi=ao

 

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In this episode, Stefan interviews Anna-Katharina Hornidge. Anna is the Director of the German Development Institute in Bonn, Germany, one of the leading research institutions and think tanks for global development and international cooperation worldwide. She is also a Professor of Global Sustainable Development at the University of Bonn.

Anne refers to herself as a Development and Knowledge Sociologist with a focus on natural resource governance and sense-making, the social construction of knowledges and 'realities', as well as cultures of knowledge production and sharing. She is also an advocate of transformative science to advance inter- and transdisciplinary science cooperation.

In the episode, Anna tells us about her career and path into science leadership through Southeast Asian Studies, sociology, development and environmental governance research. We then discuss how she draws on a constructivist perspective, and how this can be applied to understand how and why knowledge is produced within the science system, and the implications this had on funding structures, outcomes and development politics. Anna also gives her take on making interdisciplinary research work in practice, and the challenges with pushing forward a transformative science agenda.

Anna’s homepage

https://www.die-gdi.de/en/anna-katharina-hornidge/

Anna’s twitter

https://twitter.com/AnnaK_Hornidge

German Development Institute twitter

 

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In this episode, Hita, Maria and Dane were joined by Malini Ranganathan, the Faculty Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center and an Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University. We talked about her journey towards interdisciplinary research, and then discussed how aspects of positionality--like gender and race--influences interdisciplinary research. We ended by hearing about her epic fails.

 

Malini’s website: https://www.maliniranga.com/ 

 

References

Caldeira TP. Peripheral urbanization: Autoconstruction, transversal logics, and politics in cities of the global south. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 2017;35(1):3-20. doi:10.1177/0263775816658479

Said, Edward W. Culture and imperialism. Vintage, 2012.

Fraser, Nancy. "What's critical about critical theory? The case of Habermas and gender." New German critique 35 (1985): 97-131.

In this episode, Michael speaks with Kaitlin Cordes, an international lawyer and researcher who focuses on human rights and sustainable development. Most recently, Kaitlin spent eight years developing and leading the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment's work on land, agriculture, food systems, and human rights. Prior to that, she worked at Human Rights Watch and as an Advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food. Kaitlin and Michael talk about Kaitlin’s work at the Center on Sustainable Investment, which included projects focused on land tenure and human rights as well as coffee commodity chains. The conversation concludes with a discussion about Kaitlin’s latest project, 31 days of climate action. This is a project focused on the personal, incremental, and intentional ways that each of us can confront the challenge of climate change and the psychological toll that it can take on us.

 

Websites:

Kaitlin’s website: https://www.kaitlincordes.com/

31 days of climate action: https://www.31daysofclimateaction.com/

 

Apps that Kaitlin mentions:

Climate Action Now

Earth Hero

 

References:

Giridharadas, A. 2018. Winners take all: the elite charade of changing the world. Alfred A. Knopf.

Lewis, M. 2014. Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt. W. W. Norton & Company.

Nicholas, K. 2021. Under the sky we make: How to be human in a warming world. GP Putnam’s Sons.

Thaler, R. H., and C. R. Sunstein. 2009. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Penguin.

In this episode, Sivee Chawla speaks with Dane Whittaker about their research published in the International Journal of the Commons. They have authored the paper “Social-Ecological Institutional Fit in the volunteer Based organization: A study of the lake management organizations in Vilas County, Wisconsin, USA” with Alise Crippen, Corinne Johnson, and Marco A. Janssen.

The episode starts with Dane’s journey towards commons research. It continues with a conversation about the paper which focuses on volunteer based organizations as commons users and the theory of social-ecological fit in the context of Wisconsin lake social-ecological systems.

Dane is a PhD student at School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, USA. They study polycentric environmental governance of lakes in the Midwestern United States, and look forward to expanding their research to consider the role of power in shaping polycentric governance processes and outcomes in their dissertation. Dane is also actively involved with the IASC Early Career Network.

To learn more about Dane, see the following links:

https://sustainability-innovation.asu.edu/person/dane-whittaker/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/danewhittaker/

This insight clip is from full episode 53, Michael and Courtney’s interview with Jacopo Baggio.

Jacopo is an assistant professor at the School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs at the University of Central Florida.

In this insight clip, Jacopo answers a few questions related to the need for multiple methods and the challenges associated with social science research.

Jacopo's website:

 

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In this episode Hita spoke with Prof. Mahesh Rangarajan, Vice Chancellor of Krea University, India and a Professor of History and Environmental Studies at the University. They discussed what it means to be a historian, the importance of intellectual exchange and cooperation across different stages of career, and the environmental history of large charismatic mammals in south Asia. Some non-English words that occur through the episode include: 

 

• Padyatra: A journey undertaken by foot, usually with some social purpose behind it
• Pindaris: Thugs or bandits as referred to in colonial literature
• Valmiki Ramayana: An epic poem of India, revolving around the story of Rama and Sita, and composed by a sage named Valmiki
• Apharan: Kidnap
• Haathi mere saathi: (Translation: My friend, the elephant) a yesteryear Bollywood movie revolving around the friendship between an elephant and its human
• Junagadh, Bhavnagar, Baroda: Erstwhile princely states of India
• Yuvraj: Younger prince, not the heir apparent
• Bengalis: People from the eastern Indian state of Bengal
• Ghee: clarified butter
• Ser: Obsolete unit of dry volume of India, often considered equivalent to a litre

 

Mahesh’s institutional website: https://krea.edu.in/mahesh-rangarajan-phd/

References mentioned in the interview:

1. Keen, Maurice. 2000. The outlaws of medieval legend. 3rd edition. Routledge.
2. Simon Schama on libraries: https://talking-about-books.com/2016/07/06/simon-schama-on-the-london-library-financial-times/
3. Trauttman, Thomas R. 2015. Elephants and kings: an environmental history. University of Chicago Press.
4. Elvin, Mark. 2006. The retreat of the elephants: an environmental history of China. Yale University Press. 
5. Chaudhuri, Nirad Singh. 1951. Autobiography of an unknown Indian. Macmillan
6. Demuth, Bathsheba. 2020. Floating coast: an environmental history of the Bering Strait. WW Norton. 
7. Corbett, Jim. 1948. The man-eating tiger of Rudraprayag. Rupa Publications
8. Sankhala, Kailash. 1971. The story of the Indian tiger. Collins.
9. Guha, Ramachandra. 1989. The unquiet woods: ecological change and peasant resistance in the Himalaya. University of California Press. 
10. Rangarajan, M. 2013. Animals with rich histories: the case of the lions of Gir Forest, Gujarat, India. History and Theory 52:4 (109-127). 

In this episode, Stefan interviews Guido Caniglia.

Guido is the Scientific Director of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Austria. Guido’s work aims to shape epistemological and theoretical frameworks that contribute to ongoing scientific developments. Guido has worked in different scientific fields, from evolutionary-developmental biology to sustainability science and higher education for sustainable development. In his research, Guido studies how experimental and theoretical practices contribute to produce evidence and knowledge about complex phenomena of transformation, from evolutionary transitions in the history of life (e.g. the evolution of social behaviors) to purposeful transformations towards sustainability in our contemporary world (e.g. socio-ecological and socio-technical innovations).

Guido previously held a Marie-Curie post-doctoral fellowship in the Faculty of Sustainability at Leuphana University of Lüneburg. He earned a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Florence (Italy) in 2010 while working in different academic communities mostly in Italy, Germany, Spain, and the United States. In January 2016 Guido obtained a second PhD, this time in Biology, from the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University (USA). From 2011 to January 2016 he also worked as Post-Doctoral researcher and project manager for the Global Classroom Project, a transnational partnership between Arizona State University and Leuphana University engaging in curriculum reform for higher education for sustainable development.

We talk about how to improve collaborative processes in science, and how to learn to collaborate while collaborating. We also discuss his perspectives on the types of knowledge needed to foster sustainability transformations, and how that knowledge would be best produced, also his perspectives on radical pluralism.

Guido’s Institute page

https://www.kli.ac.at/en/people/kli_team/view/244

 

KLI homepage

https://www.kli.ac.at/en

 

Guido’s Google Scholar profile

https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=NQUM-sMAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

 

Freeth and Caniglia (2020) - Learning to collaborate while collaborating

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-019-00701-z

 

Caniglia, G., C. Luederitz, T. von Wirth, I. Fazey, B. Martín-López, K. Hondrila, A. König, H. von Wehrden, N. A. Schäpke, M. Laubichler, D. Lang, and D. J. Abson. 2020. A pluralistic and integrated approach to action-oriented knowledge for sustainability. Nature Sustainability.

 

Guido’s Twitter

https://twitter.com/guidocaniglia?lang=en

In this episode, Stefan speaks with Brendan Coolsaet. 

Stefan and Brendan discuss the history of environmental justice movements and scholarship, current frameworks, critical reflection on the field, transdisciplinary approaches, and the links the field has to activism. The also discuss environmental justice in the context of differen regions.

Brendan Coolsaet is a tenured Research Associate with the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research and a Research Professor at UCLouvain in Belgian. He is also the current Chair of the JUSTES research group on social and ecological justice, and an organizing committee member of the French Environmental Justice network.

Brendan refers to himself as an environmental social scientist studying environmental (in)justice in Europe. His research projects have focused on justice issues posed by the governance of agricultural biodiversity, the conservation of protected areas, the intensification of land-use changes, and the transformation of rural landscapes in Europe. He has also focused on diversifying the field of environmental justice research, both conceptually (beyond liberal approaches) and geographically.

https://brendan.coolsaet.eu/

In this episode Michael spoke with Natalie Ban, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Natalie spoke with Michael about her work with coastal indigenous communities in British Columbia, and the importance she places on engaging with her local partners in the right way, without imposing her own research questions or hypotheses, looking for windows of opportunity for her work, and trying to make sure that her work has local value. Natalie also described a distinction between two fundamentally different ways of viewing natural resource use: one that views use as extractive and detrimental, and the other which combines use with stewardship, as the indigenous communities that Natalie works with do.

Natalie's website: https://natalieban.wordpress.com/ Relevant articles by Natalie: Ban, N. C., E. Wilson, and D. Neasloss. 2020. Historical and contemporary indigenous marine conservation strategies in the North Pacific. Conservation biology: the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology 34(1):5–14.

Ban, N., E. Wilson, and D. Neasloss. 2019. Strong historical and ongoing indigenous marine governance in the northeast Pacific Ocean: a case study of the Kitasoo/Xai’xais First Nation. Ecology and Society 24(4):10. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11091-240410

In this episode, Michael talks with Mark Moritz, professor of anthropology at the Ohio State University. They discuss Mark’s work on “open” property regimes in pastoralist systems around the world, and in particular in Cameroon where Mark has conducted extensive fieldwork. Mark describes his interpretation of open property regimes as an adaptation to resource scarcity and variability in pastoralist systems. This is a unique type of property regime that is less about imposing constraints than it is guaranteeing access, working in tandem with the well-known mobility of many pastoralists.

 

Mark’s website: https://anthropology.osu.edu/people/moritz.42

 

References

Moritz, M. (2016). Open property regimes. International Journal of the Commons, 10(2), 688.

Moritz, M., et al. 2018. Emergent Sustainability in Open Property Regimes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115 (51): 12859–67.

 

This is the first episode of a new series of the podcast that we are calling "Science and Practice". In this series we will be interviewing guests who conduct applied work on environmental governance and conservation and who often act at the interface of such work and the scientific study of these topics. 

In this episode, Michael talks with Nathan Bennett, an Independent Consultant who has worked with several national and international organizations including the Nature Conservancy, Parks Canada, Environment Canada, Comunidad y Biodiversidad in Mexico, and the Smithsonian Institute. Nathan is also the Chair of the People and the Oceans Specialist Group for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). During their conversation, Michael asks Nathan about his role in bridging academic and practice-based work and the role that policy panaceas can play in each of these spaces. In his response, Nathan describes a more diagnostic approach that considers the relative costs and benefits of different types of marine policies as an important alternative to panacea thinking. They conclude the conversation by talking about Nathan's work on the role of social science in conservation and the challenges and promise of doing interdisciplinary work for conservation.

Nathan's website: https://nathanbennett.ca/

References:

Bennett, N. J., R. Roth, S. C. Klain, K. Chan, P. Christie, D. A. Clark, G. Cullman, D. Curran, T. J. Durbin, G. Epstein, A. Greenberg, M. P. Nelson, J. Sandlos, R. Stedman, T. L. Teel, R. Thomas, D. Veríssimo, and C. Wyborn. 2017. Conservation social science: Understanding and integrating human dimensions to improve conservation. Biological conservation 205:93–108.

Bennett, N. J., T. S. Whitty, E. Finkbeiner, J. Pittman, H. Bassett, S. Gelcich, and E. H. Allison. 2018. Environmental Stewardship: A Conceptual Review and Analytical Framework. Environmental management 61(4):597–614.   Bennett, N. J., A. Calò, A. Di Franco, F. Niccolini, D. Marzo, I. Domina, C. Dimitriadis, F. Sobrado, M.-C. Santoni, E. Charbonnel, M. Trujillo, J. Garcia-Charton, L. Seddiki, V. Cappanera, J. Grbin, L. Kastelic, M. Milazzo, and P. Guidetti. 2020. Social equity and marine protected areas: Perceptions of small-scale fishermen in the Mediterranean Sea. Biological conservation 244:108531.

In this episode, Michael speaks with Billie Turner II, Regents Professor at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Billie holds other positions as well, including Distinguished Global Futures Scientist at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, also at Arizona State, member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and Associate Editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Billie is a geographer and human-environmental scientist who studies land use and land cover change from prehistory to the present, and he has also contributed to our understanding of the determinants of social vulnerability and resilience. He works on deforestation, primarily in Mexico and Central America, and urban design in arid environments, especially the American Southwest. Michael and Billie talk about two topics that Billie has written on, one being the reasons for the decline of a lowland Maya population around the years 800 to 1000, and the other being a long-standing debate between Thomas Malthus, who predicted that exponential population growth would inevitably outstrip linear growth in resources, and Esther Boserup, who argued that population-induced scarcity would motivate the necessary innovations to avoid systematic decline. The interview concludes with a discussion of the book that Billie recently wrote, entitled: The Anthropocene, 101 Questions and Answers for Understanding the Human Impact on the Global Environment.

References: Turner, B. L., and Jeremy A. Sabloff. 2012. “Classic Period Collapse of the Central Maya Lowlands: Insights about Human–environment Relationships for Sustainability.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (35): 13908–14. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1210106109. Turner, B. L., and A. M. Ali. 1996. “Induced Intensification: Agricultural Change in Bangladesh with Implications for Malthus and Boserup.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 93 (25): 14984–91. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.93.25.14984. Turner, B. L. 2022. The Anthropocene: 101 Questions and Answers for Understanding the Human Impact on the Global Environment. Agenda Publishing.

This insight episode comes from full episode seventy-six with Hillary Angelo. 

Hillary is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she works as a historical sociologist focused on the relationship between the environment and large-scale transformations in urban contexts.

Hillary talks with Michael about the term social imaginary and how it allows an understanding of a certain set of social shared ideas about nature. They discuss Hillary’s recent book, “How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens,” in which Hillary argues that there is a social imaginary that she calls "urbanized nature" that can be traced and studied over time.  

Hillary's website: http://www.hillaryangelo.com

 

In this episode, Michael speaks with Margot Clarvis, the head of Nature-based solutions at C-Quest Capital. They talk about Margot's current work on promoting nature-based solutions, which is a family of approaches designed to combat climate change. Margot helps Michael unpack what is and isn't a nature-based solution, which is important to do given the diversity of projects that might be placed within this umbrella of approaches.

A central question that Margot and Michael focus on during their conversation is how the primary goals of such projects, say carbon storage, relate to broader social and ecological outcomes, with one concern being that a singular focus on a small number of outcomes could crowd out important co-benefits. In contrast to this, Margot describes the goal and the hope that such projects could leverage funding for carbon storage to provide a suite of more holistic benefits for ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.

In this episode, Divya Gupta speaks with Dr. Daniel Miller. Dan is an Associate Professor in the School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and has been extensively working on the socio-economic, ecological, and political dimensions of forests in tropical countries. 

In this conversation, they focus on Dan’s projects on conservation legacy and his other project looking at the role of forests as pathways out of poverty. Later in the episode, they also discuss Dan’s new role as the coordinator of FLARE, which stands for Forest and Livelihoods Assessment, Research, and Engagement. 

For his project on conservation legacies, the projects that Dan started as a graduate student in the west Africa region at W National Park, a park that spreads across the countries of Benin, Niger and Burkina Faso, Dan focussed on how protected area governance interfaces with international aid. Interaction on this topic was a great way to explore the critical question of what conservation funding really does for people and protected areas in tropical countries. Dan shares that international aid has disproportionate impacts on people; while it provides new sources of income to some with the creation of jobs in the areas like park management, monitoring, and tourism, these opportunities only extend to some in the community. In fact, with the implementation of conversation projects, and many lose access to the forest, thereby creating more challenges for them.  Dan suggests that this happens because the aid has a tendency of what he refers to as— ‘missing the middle’. When implemented, he says that the aid programs often tend to partner with the national government, national park agencies, and forest departments, but rarely or never with the local governments. He says this is a problem because these local governments have a bigger impact on people’s lives. As Dan continues to extend his work on conservation legacies in other countries like Bhutan, Peru, and Madagascar, he is finding that while external intervention in the form of aid in conservation in low-income countries is important, it works best when it is inculcated in the local governance structures and can bring clear benefits to people.  

In the discussion on Dan’s parallel project on forest-poverty relationships, where he is working with a large team of scholars looking at the impacts that forests can have on poverty alleviation in low-income countries. Dan shares that the greater vision that he has for this project is to highlight how forests can serve as pathways to prosperity. He suggests that changing the framing of forests for prosperity is important because in the larger policy discourse benefits of the forests is mostly linked to carbon sequestration when the reality is that forests provide critical socio-economic benefits to especially people in low-income countries. Dan emphasizes that it is important to mainstream these benefits. 

In the end, they discuss Dan’s new role as a coordinator of FLARE. He talks about how the FLARE community has been catalytic for him in establishing networks and collaboration for meaningful research. He shares that as a coordinator, he aims to retain the great sense of community that FLARE already has and grow the community by opening to new partners like practitioners, donors, activists, and local community members. 

References: 

Miller, D.C., Mansourian, S., Gabay, M., Hajjar, R., Jagger, P., Kamoto, J.F., Newton, P., Oldekop, J.A., Razafindratsima, O.H., Shyamsundar, P. and Sunderland, T., 2021. Forests, trees and poverty alleviation: Policy implications of current knowledge. Forest Policy and Economics 131: 102566.

Miller, D.C. Rana, P., Nakamura, K., Irwin, S., Cheng, S.H., Ahlroth, S. and Perge, E. 2021. A global review of the impact of forest property rights interventions on poverty. Global Environmental Change 66: 102218.

Miller, D.C., R. Hajjar. 2020. “Forests as Pathways to Prosperity: Empirical Insights and Conceptual Advances.” World Development 125: 104647.

Miller, D.C. 2014. “Explaining Global Patterns of Aid for Linked Biodiversity Conservation and Development.” World Development 59: 341-359.

Miller, D.C., A. Agrawal, and J.T. Roberts. 2013. “Biodiversity, Governance, and the Allocation of International Aid for Conservation.” Conservation Letters 6(1): 12-22.

Agrawal, A., Chhatre, A., & Gerber, E. R. (2015). Motivational crowding in sustainable development interventions. American Political Science Review, 109(3), 470-487.

Oldekop, J. A., Holmes, G., Harris, W. E., & Evans, K. L. (2016). A global assessment of the social and conservation outcomes of protected areas. Conservation Biology, 30(1), 133-141.

Persha, L., Agrawal, A., & Chhatre, A. (2011). Social and ecological synergy: local rulemaking, forest livelihoods, and biodiversity conservation. science, 331(6024), 1606-1608.

 

This week Dustin speaks with Dr. Soumya Balasubramanya, senior economist at the World Bank based with its global environmental practice. Soumya is trained as a development economist and works on applied research projects at the intersection of environment, poverty and development across Asia and Africa. Before joining the Bank in 2022, Dr. Balasubramanya spent 10 years at the International Water Management Institute, a part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, rising to group leader in economics. Her work has demonstrated extraordinary range and rigour, in her own words focused on “advancing knowledge on understanding the fractal vulnerabilities faced by the poor”. We discuss this sweep of work in three major parts. We start with the spark for becoming a development economist and what it means to think like an economist in terms of evidence and connections to other fields. We continue by exploring why we know so little about key topics in water, agriculture and development. We discuss why it is important to learn from failure, taking a deep dive into India’s groundwater management and the uneven success of policy experiments with energy pricing reforms and solar irrigation. We conclude by discussing the insights for early career researchers seeking to work in development research and what it is like to work at large development organizations in this path. 

Soumya's website: https://soumyabalasubramanya.com/

Further reading:

Balasubramanya, S., Buisson, M-C. 2022. Positive incentives for managing groundwater in the presence of informal water markets: perspectives from India. Environmental Research Letters, 17, 101001.

Balasubramanya, S., Brozovic, N., Fishman, R., Lele, S., Wang, Z. 2022. Managing irrigation under increasing water scarcity. Agricultural Economics, 53, 976-984.  

Buisson, M-C., Balasubramanya, S., Stifel, D. 2021. Electric pumps, groundwater, agriculture and water buyers: evidence from West Bengal. Journal of Development Studies, 57, 1893-1911.

Balasubramanya, S., Stifel, D. 2020. Water, agriculture and poverty in an era of climate change: why do we know so little? Food Policy, 93.

This insight episode comes from full episode seventy-four with Sara Meerow.

Sara is an assistant professor at the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. Her work focuses on interdisciplinary social-ecological systems, specifically urban geography and planning.

Sara talks with Michael about the multiple meanings of “resilience,” and the importance of clarity regarding what terms like “resilience” and “sustainability” signify in order for collaborative work to be produced.

Sara's Website: https://sgsup.asu.edu/sara-meerow 

Meerow, Sara, and Joshua P. Newell. 2019. “Urban Resilience for Whom, What, When, Where, and Why?” Urban Geography 40 (3): 309–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2016.1206395.

In Common Website: https://www.incommonpodcast.org 

Connect with us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/InCommonPod

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/incommonpodcast 

This is our 100th (full) episode! To celebrate, a group of us from the In Common team got together to do some reflecting, with each participant responding to the same prompt. This asked us to discuss how we got involved in the podcast, some inspiring and challenging moments, something that we're looking forward to doing more of with the podcast in the future, and as an aside, to talk about a recent book we have been reading.

Enjoy and thanks for listening!

References:

Elliott, A. 2021. Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City (Pulitzer Prize Winner). Random House Publishing Group.

Eriksen, S. H. 2022. Is my vulnerability so different from yours? A call for compassionate climate change research. Progress in human geography.

Ghosh, A. 2019. Gun Island: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Nagendra, H. 2022. The Bangalore Detectives Club (The Bangalore Detectives Club Series). Constable.

Rao, K. 2021. Lady Doctors: The Untold Stories of India’s First Women in Medicine. Westland Publications Private Limited.

Tolle, E. 2006. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. Penguin Publishing Group.

Vaughan, M. B. 2018. Kaiaulu: Gathering Tides. Oregon State University Press.

Vidal, G. 2011. Burr: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

This insight episode comes from full episode sixty-two, Michael and Stefan's conversation with Henrik Österblom.

Henrik is the Science Director of the Stockholm Resilience Center and a Professor at the University of Stockholm in Sweden.

In this episode, Henrik talks with Michael and Stefan about his piece in One Earth, “Unsustainable Science,” which thinks about the idea that being busy is equivalent to doing well. The three look at the pressure produced by the treadmill of papers and funding in academia, and discuss how more productive and sustainable solutions can be created through slowing down and talking with one another, rather than competing for the same end goals.

 

Henrik's SRC page: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/meet-our-team/staff/2008-01-09-osterblom.html

Unsustainable Science: https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322%2819%2930017-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS259033221930017X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

 

In Common Website: https://www.incommonpodcast.org

Connect with us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/InCommonPod

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/incommonpodcast

In our final episode of 2023, Michael speaks with the editors of the International Journal of the Commons, which In Common has worked with for the past few years, producing podcast episodes based on articles published there.

Today’s guests are Frank van Laerhoven, Associate Professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, Mike Schoon, Associate Professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University, Sergio Villamayor-Tomas, Ramon y Cajal Senior Researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology in Barcelona, Spain, and the journal's new editor-in-chief, Maria Claudia lopez, Associate Professor in the Department of Community Sustainability at Michigan State University.

Michael and the IJC editors talk about the journal and its role in the commons research community, and how the editors think about issues such as journal impact factor, one of many metrics that seem to be exerting more and more influence over our professional lives and affecting how we think about ourselves individually and collectively. Frank describes his view of the journal as a means for community development, applying the same principles of the commons and commoning that many in the commons community use in their research activities. This is also how we view the role of the In Common Podcast. Thank you for listening to us this year. Feel free to reach out with feedback and suggestions for what you like like to hear moving forward. See you in 2024!

In this episode, Michael spoke with Ramiro Berardo, a professor in the School of Environment & Natural Resources at the Ohio State University. Ramiro discussed with Michael his research on natural resource governance using social network analysis (SNA), the diversity of resources that are now available for scholars trying to learn SNA, and the more recent trend towards social-ecological network analysis. Michael also asked Ramiro to talk about the extensive effort he has put in to his online teaching during the pandemic.

Ramiro's website: http://www.ramiroberardo.net/

Papers that Michael and Ramiro discuss:

Berardo, R., & Scholz, J. T. (2010). Self‐organizing policy networks: Risk, partner selection, and cooperation in estuaries. American Journal of Political Science, 54(3), 632-649.

Berardo, R., & Lubell, M. (2016). Understanding what shapes a polycentric governance system. Public Administration Review, 76(5), 738-751.

Thanks to all our guests and listeners, the Finding Sustainability Podcast has been, in our eyes, a large success. In order to provide a sustainable platform for the podcast going forward and to expand opportunities for new types of content, we will now become an official partner with the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) and the International Journal of the Commons (IJC). The new name our podcast will be In Common.

https://incommonpodcast.org/

https://iasc-commons.org/

https://www.thecommonsjournal.org/

The In Common podcast will explore the connections between humans, their environment and each other through stories told by scholars and practitioners. In-depth interviews and methods webinars explore interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work on commons governance, social-ecological resilience, and sustainability.

The title of the podcast is meant to evoke several ideas related to the sharing of resources. First, it reflects the idea of holding resources “In common” as it relates to actions of “commoning”, a process contrary to commons enclosures that we see around the world. We hope the podcast provides a shared space for open-access conversations that can help build community. Second, it is meant to emphasize the need to see what we have “in common”, in spite of the barriers across the disciplines and perspectives that we must incorporate in order to sustainably manage shared resources. Following the Finding Sustainability Podcast, In Common will continue to have full episodes of long-form interviews, and Insight episodes containing highlights of these longer episodes. Additionally, the podcast will contain a series of Future Earth’s Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) video webinars describing different methods to analyze human-environment interactions. This series is run by Mike Schoon from Arizona State University. Our Blog, run by Graham Epstein, explores similar content but is not interview based. The blog provides an alternative space for sharing academic ideas, and will utilize online polls and surveys with our listeners and followers to discuss topics.

 

If you are already subscribed to the Finding Sustainability Podcast on your podcast player, you will continue to stay subscribed to the In Common podcast. Video webinars can be viewed on our website or directly on some podcast mobile apps such as Apple Podcasts, Overcast and Pocket Casts.

This insight episode comes from full episode seventy-nine with Courtney Carothers. 

Courtney is a professor in the college of Fisheries and Oceans at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Courtney talks with Michael about the importance of indigenous expertise and knowledge systems in maintaining fisheries, and how multiple ways of knowing and understanding the land allows for a deeper relationship with the environment that must be valued when thinking about sustainable fisheries management.

Talk by Jessica Black, Courtney Carothers, and Janessa Esquible on Indigenizing Fisheries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=448tr90KUWQ

This insight episode is from episode 041, Michael's interview with Chris Weible. 

Chris is a professor at the school of public affairs at the University of Colorado, Denver, as well as the director of his school's PhD program, and a co-director with Tanya Heikkila of the Workshop on Policy Process Research (WOPPR). 

In this insight episode, Chris talks with Michael about the evolution of the field of policy processes, and the importance of studying the policy process to better understand society and people better. 

 

Chris' website: https://publicaffairs.ucdenver.edu/people/faculty/christopher-weible 

WOPRR website: https://publicaffairs.ucdenver.edu/research-and-impact/workshop-on-policy-process-research

 

In Common Website: www.incommonpodcast.org 

Connect with us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/InCommonPod

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/incommonpodcast 

In this episode of the Navigating Interdisciplinarity series, Hita, Maria and Dane  were joined by Vanesa Castán Broto, Professor of Climate Urbanism at the Urban Institute, The University of Sheffield; and Jennifer Vanos, Professor of Climate at Health at the School of Sustainability, Arizona State University. We talked about Jenni’s and Vanesa’s journey towards interdisciplinary research, and the idea of interdisciplinarity as an interplay of disciplinary institutions. We also touched upon balancing our passion for research with strategizing for career advancement, and ended with our guests sharing some of their epic fails in their academic journey.

 

Vanesa’s website: https://urbaninstitute.group.shef.ac.uk/who-we-are/prof-vanesa-castan-broto/

 

Jenni’s website:

https://sustainability.asu.edu/person/jennifer-vanos/

 

Dane’s website:

https://sustainability.asu.edu/person/dane-whittaker/ 

 

References: Castán Broto, Vanesa, Maya Gislason, and Melf-Hinrich Ehlers. 2009. “Practising Interdisciplinarity in the Interplay between Disciplines: Experiences of Established Researchers.” Environmental Science & Policy 12 (7): 922–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2009.04.005.

Vanos, Jennifer K., Ariane Middel, Michelle N. Poletti, and Nancy J. Selover. 2018. “Evaluating the Impact of Solar Radiation on Pediatric Heat Balance within Enclosed, Hot Vehicles.” Temperature (Austin, Tex.) 5 (3): 276–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/23328940.2018.1468205.

 

We also spoke about these other books and lectures

1. Bogaard, Paul, ed. Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead: Philosophical Presuppositions of Science, 1924-1925. Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
2. Kuhn, Thomas S. The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago press, 2012.
3. Halberstam, Judith, and Jack Halberstam. The queer art of failure. Duke University Press, 2011.
4. Vatn, Arild. Institutions and the Environment. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007.

This episode is the first of our new Journal series. 

Here our team will interview authors who have published in the International Journal of the Commons (IJC), asking them about their specific published paper, its purpose and future directions. The interviews wont simply summarize the articles, but aim to add additional insight into the author's intentions and reflections.

We won’t be interviewing authors from every published piece, but are partnering with the journal editors to develop a selection process. In the future, our ambition is to work with other community oriented journals that embody the values we put forward with this podcast and platform, and to conduct interviews with a wider diversity of authors.

In this first episode, Stefan Partelow and Michael Cox interview the editors of the International Journal of the Commons (IJC) about a recent editorial reviewing the state of the field of commons research and lay out their vision for addressing some of the gaps and challenges in the journal and community going forward. The three editors are Frank van Laerhoven, Micael Schoon and Sergio Villamayor-Tomas.

The editorial is titled: “Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of Ostrom’s Governing the Commons: Traditions and Trends in the Study of the Commons, Revisited”

Link to article:

https://www.thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.5334/ijc.1030/

In this episode we talked about our favorite books of 2020, as well as some we want to read in 2021. The books we discussed are listed below in alphabetical order by title:

 

All We Can Save by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson

Black Faces, White Spaces by Carolyn Finney

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Control of Nature by John McPhee

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth

The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin

Erosion: Essays of Undoing by Terry Tempest Williams

Far-fetched Facts by Richard Rottenburg

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollen

Invisible women by Caroline Criado Perez

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard Thaler

Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein

On the Backs of Tortoises by Elizabeth Hennessy

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

The Paradoxes of Transparency by Doug Wilson

Range by David Epstein

Seeing Like a State by James Scott

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

Unhinged by Daniel Carlat

Untamed by Glennon Doyle

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

In this episode, Michael spoke with Courtney Carothers, a professor in the college of Fisheries and Oceans at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. They discussed Courtney’s work on "catch share", or individual transferable quota policies in fisheries, indigenous fisheries management systems, and the negative impacts that catch shares have often had on indigenous fishers. Catch shares are a dominant panacea being employed by the U.S. government to manage our shared fisheries resources, and a important critique of them discussed during the interview is the ways in which they prioritize efficiency and profit, lead to rights consolidation, and alienate local users from their traditional livelihoods. Courtney framed this process as being a symptomatic component of the broader processes of forced integration and colonization that has occurred in the U.S. and Canada. They also talked about how collaborative relationships can be built for transdisciplinary work. References:

Carothers, Courtney, and Catherine Chambers. 2012. “Fisheries Privatization and the Remaking of Fishery Systems.” Environment and Society 3 (1). https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2012.030104.

Donkersloot, Rachel, and Courtney Carothers. 2017. “Chapter 12 - Beyond Privatization: Rethinking Fisheries Stewardship and Conservation in the North Pacific.” In Conservation for the Anthropocene Ocean, edited by Phillip S. Levin and Melissa R. Poe, 253–70. Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-805375-1.00012-X.

Voo, Lee van der. 2016. The Fish Market: Inside the Big-Money Battle for the Ocean and Your Dinner Plate. St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

 

Media:

Talk by Dr. Leroy Little Bear on Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJSJ28eEUjI  

Talks and videos posted by Dr. Seth Macinko: http://sethmacinko.com/videos

Talk by Courtney that provides more depth on some of her ITQ research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_2qlfDngO4  

Talk by Jessica Black, Courtney Carothers, and Janessa Esquible on Indigenizing Fisheries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=448tr90KUWQ

Planet Money episode that Michael mentions: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/11/04/454698093/episode-661-the-less-deadly-catch Other links:

Survival denied report that Courtney mentions: http://allianceforajustsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Survival-Denied2.pdf

https://www.tamamta.org/

https://www.uaf.edu/ankn/publications/collective-works-of-angay/

https://oceans.ubc.ca/centre-for-indigenous-fisheries/

https://www.waysofknowingforum.ca/

This is the third episode in our Future Fisheries Management series, which we are running in collaboration with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh.

In this episode, Michael speaks with Paige Roberts, a fisheries ecologist and geographic information systems, or GIS, expert who is currently an independent consultant after working for nine years for the One Earth Future Foundation, an organization that specializes in finding sustainable solutions in fragile and conflict-affected settings. During her time with One Earth, Paige was closely involved with Project Badweyn in the country of Somalia. Through this project Paige and her colleagues created a free online tool to map out Somali coastal resources and fishing activities to help a range af actors better understand interactions between human activities and the environment. Michael and Paige discuss this project as well as efforts of of the One Earth Future Foundation to promote the sustainability of coastal fisheries through a co-management approach. The conversation concludes with a discussion of Paige’s next steps since leaving the One Earth Foundation.

 

References:

A summary of Project Badweyn: https://oneearthfuture.org/en/secure-fisheries/project-badweyn-mapping-somali-coastal-resources-0

Paige describing Project Badweyn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UU2fCo6Y1JU

GIS resources that Paige shared after the interview:

Esri makes some of the most popular GIS software. It's a subscription service, but you can get a personal license for around $100 for a year, which gives you access to ArcGIS Pro Software, ArcGIS Online, and the self-paced online training which has a slew of training modules from beginner to advanced. The ArcGIS Pro software is fairly intuitive once you learn the basics of GIS.

For a free option, QGIS is an open-source GIS software with all the same capabilities as ArcGIS but in a slightly less intuitive interface. It's widely used so there are ample resources online including its own Training Manual. There are many other free resources online and a quick Google search can get you anything you need, from blogs to videos on beginning to advanced techniques and troubleshooting.

Michael and Courtney interviewed Nicola Ulibarri, an assistant professor in the department of urban planning and public policy at the University of California, Irvine.  We talked about Nicola's work on collaborative governance and water management plans in the Central valley of California, where Nicola has been studying the ability of a variety of such plans to address climate change and social equity. We also highlighted one of the best figures we've seen depicting a groundwater-based social-ecological system! This is from the first reference listed below.

 

Nicola's website: https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/ulibarri/

 

References mentioned:

Ulibarri, Nicola, and Nataly Escobedo Garcia. 2020. “Comparing Complexity in Watershed Governance: The Case of California.” WATER 12 (3): 766. Ulibarri, Nicola, Nataly Escobedo Garcia, Rebecca L. Nelson, Amanda E. Cravens, and Ryan J. McCarty. 2021. “Assessing the Feasibility of Managed Aquifer Recharge in California.” Water Resources Research 57 (3).

This insight episode comes from full episode seventy-seven with Derek Kauneckis.

Derek is an associate professor at the Desert Institute in Nevada where his work focuses on the waste commons and technological innovation.

Derek talks with Michael about how watersheds can be viewed as an information system, and the importance of designing technology that fits and serves the needs of the system it is used in.

Derek’s website: https://www.dri.edu/directory/derek-kauneckis/

In this episode, Michael speaks with Eric Klopfer, the chair of the department of Comparative Media Studies and Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT. At MIT Eric is also the director of the Scheller Teacher Education program as well as the Education Arcade.

Eric is a leader in the space of game design for education. He recently co-authored a book on the subject: Resonant Games, Design Principles for Learning Games that Connect Hearts, Minds and the Everyday. During the conversation, Eric discusses games as an example of experiential learning and emphasizes the importance of combining a game exercise with reflection, which is where the real learning happens through what Eric calls an action-reflection cycle.

Eric and Michael also discuss the game that originally led Michael to speak to Eric: a simulation of the tragedy of the commons in a fishery, which Eric led the development of. In addition to this episode, Michael discusses his implementations of this game in a recent blog post on the In Common website. You can find more about this game and Eric's work at this web address:

https://education.mit.edu/project-type/games/

In this episode, Michael is joined by a new co-host of the podcast, Divya Gupta, to interview Forrest Fleischman, their friend and colleague currently working as a professor of forest resources at the University of Minnesota. Forrest talked to Michael and Divya about the two years he spent in India studying forest governance, his examination of joint forest management programs there, and his discovery that such projects seem to have often focused more on simplified metrics around tree planting and plantations than engaging with local communities. He also discussed his empirical examination of the policy known as forest landscape restoration, a supposedly transformative approach that generates win-wins for all involved. Forrest has become an important voice in this space, raising doubts about the ability of projects oriented primarily around tree plantings to solve local to global environmental issues.

Forrest's website: https://forestry.umn.edu/people/forrest-fleischman

References:

Fleischman, F. 2014. Why do Foresters Plant Trees? Testing Theories of Bureaucratic Decision-Making in Central India. World Development 62: 62-74.   Fleischman, F. et al. 2018. Pitfalls of Tree Planting Show Why We Need People-Centered Natural Climate Solutions. BioScience 70(11): 947–950.   Veldman, J.W. et al. 2019. Comment on The global tree restoration potential. Science 366 (6463).

In this episode, Stefan speaks with Lauren Thomas Quigley. Lauren is a research scientist at IBM Research and an Affiliate Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering. She researches and develops practical data-centric solutions at the intersection of technology, data, and social justice with emphasis on collaboration with nonprofit organizations and community.  Lauren has led education at scale efforts in government, higher education, nonprofits, and the tech industry, many of which have focused on learning outside of the traditional classroom. A core goal of her work is to improve interdisciplinary and intersectional pathways into STEM and ensuring that people have access to technology that works for them.

https://laurenthomasquigley.com/

www.incommonpodcast.org

 

In this episode, Michael spoke with Daniel Decaro, associate professor at the University of Louisville with a joint appointment in the Department of Urban and Public Affairs and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Daniel has conducted experimental research on the effects of participation and enforcement on collective-action. Based on this work, he has developed the concept of participatory fit. This represents the idea that there is cultural variation in how people perceive their basic needs of autonomy and procedural justice being met through a participatory process, and therefore mechanisms of participatory governance must adapt to fit with this variation. What is authentically participatory for one person may not be for another. Daniel and Michael also talked about the relationship that participation has to collective-action and enforcement, based on a finding from DeCaro et al. (2015) that the effects of participating and enforcement are synergistic, producing increased cooperation when combined with each other.

 

Daniel’s website: https://louisville.edu/psychology/d-decaro

References:

DeCaro, D., and M. Stokes. 2008. “Social‐psychological Principles of Community‐based Conservation and Conservancy Motivation: Attaining Goals within an Autonomy‐supportive Environment.” Conservation Biology: The Journal of the Society for Conservation Biology.

DeCaro, Daniel A., and Michael K. Stokes. 2013. “Public Participation and Institutional Fit: A Social-Psychological Perspective.” Ecology and Society 18 (4).

DeCaro, D. A., M. A. Janssen, and A. Lee. 2015. “Synergistic Effects of Voting and Enforcement on Internalized Motivation to Cooperate in a Resource Dilemma.” Judgment and Decision Making.

DeCaro, Daniel A., Marco A. Janssen, and Allen Lee. 2021. “Motivational Foundations of Communication, Voluntary Cooperation, and Self-Governance in a Common-Pool Resource Dilemma.” Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, no. 100016 (July): 100016.

This insight episode is taken from full episode 058, Stefan's conversation with Anna-Katharina Hornidge.

Anna is the Director of the German Development Institute in Bonn, Germany, one of the leading research institutions and think tanks for global development and international cooperation worldwide. She is also a Professor of Global Sustainable Development at the University of Bonn.

Anna refers to herself as a Development and Knowledge Sociologist with a focus on natural resource governance and sense-making, the social construction of knowledges and 'realities', as well as cultures of knowledge production and sharing. She is also an advocate of transformative science to advance inter- and transdisciplinary science cooperation.

In the clip, we explore Anna’s views on social constructivism, how it contrasts with other science perspectives, and how it is useful for understanding challenges at the science-policy interface.

Anna’s homepage

https://www.die-gdi.de/en/anna-katharina-hornidge/

Anna’s twitter

https://twitter.com/AnnaK_Hornidge

German Development Institute twitter

 

In Common Podcast

www.incommonpodcast.org

In this episode, Michael speaks with Jake Kheel, Vice President of Sustainability at the Grupo Puntacana Foundation, a non-profit organization located in the Dominican Republic. The Foundation is funded in large part by Grupo Puntacana, a major tourism company in Punta Cana, which is the most well-known tourism destination in the DR. As background, Michael met Jake some years ago through Michael's longtime collaborator, Freddie Payton, who runs the Dominican NGO AgroFrontera in the province of Montecristi on the other side of the country.

Jake and Michael discuss Jake’s 2021 book, Waking the Sleeping Giant: Unlocking the Hidden Power of Business to Save the Planet. In the book Jake describes his experiences working in Punta Cana, and the efforts that he and his colleagues have made to address numerous social and environmental issues, including overfishing, coral degradation, invasive seaweed, waste disposal, and water management. Jake and Michael discuss the reasons behind the successes of the Foundation, including the presence of local champions who invest in a particular place and its problems for the long term, which may be less glamorous but is critical for enduring success.

 

References

Jake’s website: https://www.jakekheel.com/

Kheel, J. 2021. Waking the sleeping giant : unlocking the hidden power of business to save the planet. Lioncrest Publishing.

In this episode, Michael speaks with Jean Wiener, the founder and director of the Foundation for the Protection of Marine Biodiversity, or FOPROBIM. Jean and his organization have worked for decades on marine conservation in Haiti, where Jean has played a critical role in helping to establish a group of marine protected areas. In 2015, Jean was awarded the Goldman Environmental prize in recognition for his work. Jean talks with Michael about his career path and his work to develop marine conservation in Haiti, both formally and from the bottom up. They discuss the challenges that Jean has confronted and continues to deal with under often difficult social and political conditions, and what he hopes for in the future.

 

FOPROBIM website: https://www.foprobim.org/

Link to Jean’s Goldman prize award: https://www.goldmanprize.org/recipient/jean-wiener/

Video about Jean’s work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFSGdGvpQ4U

In this episode, Michael and Stefan spoke with Arun Agrawal, the Samuel Trask Dana Professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Arun has played an important role in the development of the Commons field and the study of the related subjects of conservation and development. They talked about Arun's path to an academic career, his thoughts about the history and current developments of the study of the Commons, and his thoughts on the categories and dichotomies that structure so much of our thinking in this field. They also talked about Arun's professional roles, including being editor-in-chief of World Development and the director of the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) program.

Arun's website: http://www.arunagrawal.org/

References:

Agrawal, Arun. 2005. Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ferraro, Paul J., and Arun Agrawal. 2021. “Synthesizing Evidence in Sustainability Science through Harmonized Experiments: Community Monitoring in Common Pool Resources.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 118 (29). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2106489118.

This is the fifth episode in our future fisheries management series, which we are running in collaboration with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh.

Today’s guest, Kerrlene Wills, participated in the negotiation process for the 2022 World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement on fishing subsidies as a representative of the nation of Guayana, and has written about the resulting agreement. This is primarily aimed towards curbing subsidies for what is known as illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. It also tried curb the fishing of over-depleted populations, and vessels fishing on the unregulated high seas. A point that Kerrlene makes is that not all subsidies are the same, and therefore should not be subject to the same rules and constraints. The main category that Kerrlene highlights are subsidies that developing countries give to small-scale fishers, which are important for local livelihoods and which don’t necessarily lead to overfishing through overcaptilazition.

Kerrlene is currently the director of Ocean and Climate at the UN Foundation, and she discusses her current work with Michael, in which she is involved in efforts to decarbonize the global transportation industry trough some type of pricing mechanism along the lines of a carbon tax or a cap and trade scheme.

Resources:

Kerrlene’s website at the UN Foundation: https://unfoundation.org/author/kerrlene-wills/

Kerrlene’s article on fisheries subsidies: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4607279

WTO agreement on fisheries webpage: https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/rulesneg_e/fish_e/fish_e.htm

Guardian piece about the WTO agreement: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/21/first-wto-deal-on-fishing-subsidies-hailed-as-historic-despite-big-holes

In this episode, Divya speaks with Dr. Johan Oldekop. Johan is a senior lecturer at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. He conducts interdisciplinary research and uses large-scale publicly available datasets to understand tradeoffs and synergies between conservation and development outcomes.

In this conversation, they primarily focused on Johan’s work on the impact evaluation of the zero hunger program in Brazil and his parallel research exploring the links between forests and livelihoods in the global south.

For both these projects, Johan conducted large-scale research and worked with big datasets. As we discussed these projects, it was interesting to learn what working on a large scale with big datasets looks like, including its advantages and also some of the key limitations.

Johan shared that in his research on the impact evaluation of the zero hunger program, a program that was implemented to meet the sustainable development goal of reducing hunger in Brazil, he found that in addition to addressing hunger, the program also improves households’ access to nutrition and address the supply chain issues of agriculture production. Johan emphasized that it is important to evaluate and understand the multidimensional impacts of social protection programs so they can be implemented to their fullest potential and yield maximum benefits.

For his research on exploring forest-livelihood linkages in the global south, Johan’s research showed that forest management and restoration programs that prioritized community rights are more likely to reduce deforestation and poverty and eventually align with global goals for climate mitigation, environmental justice, and sustainable development.

In the end, Divya and Johan wrapped up the conversation with a discussion on Johan’s upcoming research project, which aims to examine the drivers of reforestation and sustainable forest transitions in India, Nepal, Brazil, and Mexico.

References:

Oldekop, J. A., Holmes, G., Harris, W. E., & Evans, K. L. (2016). A global assessment of the social and conservation outcomes of protected areas. Conservation Biology, 30(1), 133-141.

Oldekop, J. A., Sims, K. R., Karna, B. K., Whittingham, M. J., & Agrawal, A. (2019). Reductions in deforestation and poverty from decentralized forest management in Nepal. Nature Sustainability, 2(5), 421-428.

Hajjar, R., Oldekop, J. A., Cronkleton, P., Newton, P., Russell, A. J., & Zhou, W. (2021). A global analysis of the social and environmental outcomes of community forests. Nature Sustainability, 4(3), 216-224.

Oldekop, J. A., Rasmussen, L. V., Agrawal, A., Bebbington, A. J., Meyfroidt, P., Bengston, D. N., … & Wilson, S. J. (2020). Forest-linked livelihoods in a globalized world. Nature Plants, 6(12), 1400-1407.

Erbaugh, J. T., & Oldekop, J. A. (2018). Forest landscape restoration for livelihoods and well-being. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 32, 76-83.

Oldekop, J. A., Chappell, M. J., Peixoto, F. E. B., Paglia, A. P., do Prado Rodrigues, M. S., & Evans, K. L. (2015). Linking Brazil’s food security policies to agricultural change. Food Security, 7, 779-793.

In this episode Michael spoke with Hillary Angelo, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Hillary is an historical sociologist who focuses on the relationship between the environment and large-scale transformations in urban contexts. They discussed Hillary's recent book "How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens."

Hillary's website: http://www.hillaryangelo.com/

Video that Michael mentions in the conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txg-bPHZBV4&t=2698s

In this episode, Dustin and Hita speak with Giulio Boccaletti, a writer, entrepreneur and honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford. They discuss Giulio’s recent book, Water: a Biography, which he started writing during his former role as Chief Strategy Officer at The Nature Conservancy. In the book, Giulio traces the relationship between water and humanity from ancient civilizations and the Roman empire to the American West and China. He argues that the rise of the modern republic is linked to the central role water had in society, and he calls for a new era of constitutional reform that accounts for environmental and climate change. They discuss the political and institutional theory at the heart of the book, and several of its arguments and case studies, highlighted by the Tennessee Valley Authority. They conclude with brief reflections from Giulio on conservation strategy and practice, and the challenges of legitimacy in community-based conservation initiatives.

This insight episode comes from full episode eighty-one with Nejem Raheem.

Nejem is an associate professor of economics at Emerson College, where he focuses on the economics of natural resource and environmental issues.

Nejem speaks with Michael about the similarities between his childhood experiences in Bangladesh and Nepal and the New Mexico acequias. The two discuss their work on the acequias and the complexity of the systems based upon western codifications of water rights and the subsequent valuation given to water in the US, and how this lacks a complete valuation of the social importance of water in the acequias.

Nejem's website: https://www.emerson.edu/faculty-staff-directory/nejem-raheem

References:

Raheem, N., S. Archambault, E. Arellano, M. Gonzales, D. Kopp, J. Rivera, S. Guldan, et al. 2015. “A Framework for Assessing Ecosystem Services in Acequia Irrigation Communities of the Upper Río Grande Watershed.” WIREs. Water 2 (5): 559–75. https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1091.