Abstract for the 20th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons. Submit abstract.
Marcus Petz, Andrius Kulikauskas
Econet action plan for learning about ourselves, our society, our environment
Econet (www.e-c-o.net) is an online community of citizen scientists who work together as both ecological thinkers and ecological practitioners. The Econet action plan for 2025 is a novel three-layer research program which hypothesizes that ecological living is rooted in empathy for others in our environment, which is rooted in empathy for ourselves, which is rooted in our own self-knowledge.
How can we learn about ourselves? A team at TheoryTranslator.com collects conceptual frameworks - dichotomies, trichotomies, tetrachotomies - considering especially those that illustrate a dialogue between three minds within us: one that answers, one that questions, and one that investigates how to align the other two. Can we recognize such voices within us? and thus make sense of our inner tensions?
How can we learn about our situation? A second team collects and systematizes the ways that economists figure things out. This is uncovering the arbitrary justifications for property, the dialogue between use value and exchange value, the centrality of the functions of money, the properties which relate these functions, and the ultimate purpose of meaningful inclusion. Making sense of economics should allow us to make sense of community economics. Are they the same discipline? Or do they differ in their methodologies, assumptions and possibilities? How can economics serve community? What initiatives foster a healthy economic culture? Is there a logic of circumstances and stages, as posited by syntropic finance?
How can we learn about others in our environment? A third team experiments with 70 liter tabletop units pioneered by Jere Northrop of TimberFish Technologies. A citizen scientist places muck from a local pond into an aquarium, feeds it wood chips, and shows the resulting microorganisms and worms suffice to sustain small fish. This ecobox (ecosystem-in-a-box) serves as a model organism. A network of enthusiasts in all bioregions can thus perform tests and share data about these standardized miniature ecosystems. They can give the ecosystems problems to solve, and observe how they figure things out. Do these ecosystems exhibit the three minds? Can they help us make sense of natural systems such as woods or swamps or lakes?
These three investigations apply our human empathy in learning about ourselves, our society and our environment. We may thereby develop a language of wisdom by which we comprehend, transcend and extend the limits of our empathy.
Panel 2.3. (In-person) Relationality and the Climate Commons: Understanding, Feeling, Connecting, and Working with Others.
- Co-Chairs: Raul Lejano, Marcela Brugnach, Juan-Felipe Ortiz-Riomalo, and Fikret Berkes.
- Action around climate change poses perhaps the most daunting collective action problem for the commons. The issue transcends institutional boundaries, cuts across all scales of analysis (individual, community, nation, globe), and poses free rider problems encompassing multiple generations. The literature has proposed a number of institutional pathways for engendering collective action, including state-centered, market-based, and communitarian modes of organization. These institutional models trigger collective action through mechanisms involving individual rationality, social pressure, reciprocity, and others. However, in recent years, there has emerged another, underutilized pathway for collective action –relationality. Through social networks, connections across individuals and groups bring about pro-environmental action through mechanisms involving cognitive and emotional pathways (e.g., feeling empathy, caring for others). We will review, first, the conceptual basis for the relational model of collective action and, secondly, present a number of case studies that provide evidence for its activation in situations surrounding the climate commons.
- Brugnach et al. (2021). Relational quality and uncertainty in common pool water management. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 15188.
- Lejano,R. (2023). Caring, Empathy, and the Commons. Cambridge University Press.
- Ortiz-Riomalo,J.F. et al. (2021). Inducing perspective-taking for prosocial behaviour in natural resource management. JEEM, 110, 102513.