2026-01-22
Robert Home, Mirjam Schleiffer, Rebekka Frick, Ghezal Sabir, Yennie Katarina Bredin, Frode Thomassen Singsaas, Sandra Karner, Barbara Smith, Marta Bonetti
Discourses are linguistic expressions of socially constructed understandings of phenomena, which drive power dynamics by implicitly conveying values that may either support or suppress the interests of involved actors. Proponents of specific discourses often seek to establish their interpretation of a phenomenon as the predominant or sole narrative with the aim of furthering their own interests. This is particularly concerning when applied to complex public issues, such as biodiversity loss, in a post truth age in which alterative facts and misinformation can shape public debate and social perceptions more powerfully than objective evidence or rational argument. This paper examines how interest groups perceive and communicate about biodiversity, which sheds light on the underlying worldview, interests, and strategies behind their messaging. We examined documents from two biodiversity-relevant actor groups in Europe: political parties in Italy, Switzerland, Norway, and Austria; and environmental NGOs in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Norway. Text elements within the documents were categorised according to their rhetorical functions, including ‘warning’, ‘calling for action (or inaction)’, ‘informing’, ‘persuading’, ‘accusing’, ‘entertaining’, ‘othering’, and ‘raising hope’. The analysis reveals that political parties predominantly employ a rhetoric centred on ‘persuading’, ‘accusing’, and ‘othering’, aiming to rationalise and gain political support their stances and/or to assert themselves as solutions to biodiversity challenges. Environmental NGOs, on the other hand, use rhetoric focussed on ‘informing’, ‘warning’, and ‘persuading’, with consequences of action or inaction often linked to human impacts, to appeal to potential and actual supporters of their activities. These findings reveal the strategic use of biodiversity discourse by different actors to influence their targeted audiences, which provides insights for those interested in creating interventions to influence stakeholder perceptions and behaviours.
2026-01-22
Hussein M. Sulieman
This paper investigates the changing mobility practices of pastoralists in Sudan as they seek to sustain their livelihoods. The study focuses on the Fallata pastoralists in Gadarif State, eastern Sudan, as a case study to demonstrate these changes. Traditionally relying on long-distance movements to seasonal grazing areas, much of it across communal grazing lands, to access seasonal grazing areas, these pastoralists now face significant challenges due to the expansion of mechanized agriculture, land privatization, and environmental degradation. Using a mixed-methods approach—incorporating interviews, field observations, remote sensing, and participatory geographical information systems (PGIS)—the research reveals that the Fallata pastoralists have adapted to fragmented landscapes through a range of coping and adaptive strategies, including localized and intermediate-scale movements, seasonal east-west shifts toward riverine and border areas, the use of truck transport for livestock, and increasing integration with farming activities. Some occasionally cross the border into Ethiopia to access grazing and water resources. These evolving practices reflect a flexible and resilient response to land-use constraints, resource scarcity, and insecurity in eastern Sudan. However, some of the coping strategies carry economic risks and potential social and ecological impacts. These findings highlight the urgent need for policy reforms that support sustainable pastoral mobility and conflict resolution, grounded in the specific experiences of the Fallata pastoralists. By reflecting the realities of fragmented landscapes, negotiated access, and adaptive strategies, the study contributes to the growing debate on what makes nomadic pastoralist land-use systems resilient under conditions of climate change and uncertainty.
2025-11-14
Mirjam Schleiffer, Grania Cooke, Gemma Foster, Robert Home, Donna Oldbury-Thomas, Barbara Smith
The loss of global biodiversity is recognised by politics and science as a global crisis. Its anthropogenic causes require a radical societal transformation, but stakeholder interests and low political priority decelerate action. The term’s complexity and its vague usage in everyday life hinder public engagement and allow for a variety of understandings of the drivers and impacts of biodiversity decline in public discourse. News outlets play a crucial role in shaping how biodiversity is understood and valued. This study explores how European news outlets represent “biodiversity” and traces the evolution of this discourse over time. Using a case study approach, we analysed the discourse on biodiversity in news articles from Austria, Czechia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and United Kingdom. For each country, five widely circulated national news outlets with diverse ideological perspectives were selected. For each news outlet, we collected articles mentioning biodiversity published in 2010 and 2022, yielding 169 and 385 articles, respectively. The articles were analysed using a qualitative content analysis in which statements were categorised with a framework focusing on definitions, values, rhetorical functions and actors. The results show that biodiversity is only rarely defined in European media. Over time, its attributed values have shifted from nature-centred (‘ecocentric’) to human-centred (‘anthropocentric’), though the implications of this shift remain unclear. Additionally, while the term used to be frequently associated with scientific actors in 2010, by 2022 a broader range of actors, mainly NGOs and governments, had gained prominence. Cross-country differences were also noted, particularly in the emotional tone of reporting. The analysis offers a broad overview of biodiversity discourse of European news outlets and offers valuable insights for future policy and communication strategies. This nuanced analysis underscores the complexity and plurality of biodiversity values and discourses in Europe.
2025-10-08
Jessica Carrick-Hagenbarth
This article applies theories of commoning and institutional bricolage to analyze how agrarian settlements in Northeastern Brazil navigated a World Bank community-driven development (CDD) project focused on infrastructure and productive activities. This project evolved out of a successful Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) occupation of state offices that secured access to rural development funds, resulting in an unusual partnership where the MST selected recipient settlements and partnered with state agencies for implementation under standard CDD guidelines. Using mixed methods across eight settlements, including 62 interviews, a household survey (n = 93), and site visits, I analyze how communities with robust governance and collective work institutions developed through commoning practices navigated the CDD project framework. Settlers acted as bricoleurs (Cleaver, 2012) to adapt settlement institutions to support CDD project governance and collective work. These actions are analyzed through de Koning’s three processes of institutional bricolage (2011): alteration (minimal compliance with bureaucratic requirements while maintaining existing governance), aggregation (repurposing settlement institutions to manage projects), and articulation (resisting external sanctions that conflicted with local norms). While settlement institutions enabled project implementation, they proved insufficient for addressing technical and marketing challenges. Even in settlements with strong collective organization, where CDD had the best chance of success, project effectiveness depended on existing commoning practices rather than CDD’s institutional framework, representing a fundamental misalignment between the external agency and the settlements.
2025-09-04
Svetoslava Toncheva, Julian Perry, Robert Fletcher
The question of the role of non-humans in conservation has given rise to a number of pressing debates. Proponents of ecocentrism, multispecies ethnography or the post-human turn have all aimed to promote more-than-human perspectives and attribute equal importance to all forms of (animate) life. However, their relative failure to translate this advocacy into actual conservation decision making has given rise to the question how to appropriately represent non-humans in conservation governance for more inclusive and just conservation. This paper introduces and outlines an approach to addressing this issue we term multispecies constitutionality by exploring a case of human-bear interactions in the commons of the Rodopi mountains of Bulgaria, where outmigration and postsocialist transformations have emptied space for brown bears in areas previously inhabited or managed by humans. Building on longstanding exploration of common pool resource governance, growing discussion of “constitutionality” is intended to capture how the “agency and creativity” of bottom-up governance processes are able to effectively manage natural resources in the absence of external authority, while still accounting for local power relations in a way commons research has often overlooked. Yet both commons and consitutionality research has thus far remained focused on how humans decide among themselves how to interact with nonhumans without actively including the latter. Here, we expand our focus to take into account calls for inclusion of “more-than-human” perspectives in governance and decision-making to achieve a more holistic understanding of human-bear coexistence and introduce an approach for investigating multispecies interactions that accounts for the role of non-human actors in shaping shared landscapes.
2025-07-31
Jesper Larsson, Eva-Lotta Päiviö Sjaunja
How can a self-governance perspective reshape our understanding of Indigenous Arctic histories? This paper aims at advancing our understanding about aboriginal societies and their historical use of common pool resources. By applying a self-governance approach, it moves beyond state-centric narratives that have long dominated interpretations of historical change, and highlights how Indigenous agency and internal dynamics have shaped historical trajectories. Aboriginal societies around the world have independently transitioned their production modes throughout history. In northern Eurasia, one such major transition manifested in a movement away from transport reindeer herding towards reindeer pastoralism from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Northern Fennoscandia was one of the first regions to witness this shift, and the Indigenous Sami there are an especially suitable case to study. The historical sources are exceptionally rich in the area, and Sami are an interesting case because reindeer pastoralism developed in a foraging culture, with many households continuing on as hunters and fishers long after pastoralism had been introduced. The shift to pastoralism was driven by concomitant, self-governed responses as the transition progressed. By combining historical sources and self-governance frameworks, this analysis advances the discussion about how Indigenous reindeer-herding societies – governance and social relations included – were affected by the transformation from 1550–1800 AD. The Sami case reflects that there was a dynamic interaction between customary rules-in-use and colonial rules-in-form, that complicates interpretations of Indigenous societies as either autonomous or passive in historical shifts.
2025-06-12
Frank Moulaert, Liana Simmons, Constanza Parra
This paper focuses on subjectivities of agents involved in socially innovative commoning practices. Social change agents, often influenced by neoliberal ideologies and individualist subjectivities, sometimes prioritize ‘practical’ approaches over approaches addressing the complexity of social relations and ethics in commoning; this can unintentionally undermine collective efforts, reinforcing the very systems these initiatives seek to dismantle. Responding to insights from our four-year large-scale research project on commoning, the paper proposes the groundwork for examining subjectivities and subjectivation processes within socially innovative commoning. It draws from an open definition of subjectivity volunteered by the psychologist Fernando González Rey, highlighting how subjectivity of actors is deeply intertwined with cultural, historical, and social contexts. It addresses individual and social subjectivation, showing how collective subjectivity is formed through their interaction. Collective subjectivation is staged by drawing from three literatures that give attention to the role of subjectivity and subjectivation in social and political action: political ecology (emotional and performative experiences of subjects as driving forces for the politics of resistance), ecofeminism (understanding affective and communicative social relations among humans and between humans and more-than-humans in everyday experiences), and anarchism (exploring the interplay between individual freedom and social cooperation in reimagining the political subject and community building). Collective subjectivation involves re-imagining and re-building social relations on the grounds of solidarity in opposition to dominant individualist mindsets, engaging in human-nature interactions, and integrating personal emotions, affective dimensions, and psychoanalytic insights to stimulate new collective practices.
2025-04-15
Adrien O. T. Guisan, Tianzhu Liu, Jean-David Gerber
The concept of commons has gained traction in housing research. However, when translated to the housing field, the notion of commons is interpreted in various ways and applied to a large range of situations. This increasing interest in the commons has thus resulted in a high degree of conceptual pluralism in the field. While this pluralism is inevitable, and, to a certain extent, necessary to grasp a complex social reality, it can also lead to confusion. This article addresses this issue by conducting a systematic scoping review of the literature from 1990 to 2023 to capture how the concept of commons is used in housing research. Using thematic coding and k-mode clustering, we identify five distinct clusters: (i) “commons in housing”, with a focus on collective action problems, (ii) “housing as commons”, with a focus on the use-value of collective housing arrangements and their de-commodification, (iii) “commoning in housing”, with a focus on socially reproductive collective practices, (iv) “commons/commoning for housing”, with a focus on co-production in housing and urban governance, and (v) “commons/commoning as a political practice”, with a focus on everyday politics and housing activism. Our cluster-based approach thus provides a valuable framework to navigate the pluralism of the field and can be replicated in other subject areas.