Commons Governance Program

Professor Insa Theesfeld
Interim Director, Commons Governance Program
Professor of Agricultural, Environmental and Food Policy, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
812/856-4522 / insathee@iu.edu

Our research program on Commons Governance supports and pursues multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research on the commons. This is an area of study for which the Ostrom Workshop is well known around the world. Elinor Ostrom along with several Workshop colleagues over a long period of years can fairly be said to have led the re-emergence of scholarly interest in the commons. Today, scholarly research on the commons is a vibrant and still-growing field generating a tremendous amount of creative activity. Equally remarkable is the diversity of topics being pursued. Contemporary commons research now encompasses information access and management, public health and medical care, housing, and more – a nearly limitless range of topics from urban green space to outer space. Our Commons Governance research program will engage with scholars and centers across Indiana University and around the world in the ongoing quest to understand and explain how people endeavor to develop and sustain all manner of resources in common. This program contains close links to the international member community of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC), the leading professional association dedicated to the commons. Among its founders in 1989 was Elinor Ostrom.

Many writers, artists, and designers look and listen to prior works for inspiration. Under the law, the crucial inquiry is whether the source of the inspiration has been transformed sufficiently so that the new design can be considered “original” rather than “derived.” This Data Management and Information Governance Working Group will examine artistic expression in the digital world, with an eye toward the use of the Ostrom Frameworks.

The Working Group will be conducted both in person at the Ostrom Workshop on the IU Bloomington campus and online via Zoom. The Group will be an interactive one, with participants expected to be active in the group’s agenda creation and monthly activities.

The Working Group is co-hosted by Angie Raymond, Director, Ostrom Workshop Data Management and Information Governance; Tim Fort, the Eveleigh Professorship in Business Ethics, the Business Law and Ethics Department at the Kelley School of Business; and Jaime Carini, Adam Smith Fellow at the Mercatus Center and a doctoral student in Musicology and Organ Performance & Literature at the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University.

If you have an interest in artistic commons and want to get involved, please sign up.

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Digital governance promotes new forms of interaction between citizen and civic institutions, new modalities of public services and policies, and the possibility of using data and information to improve government processes and promote public welfare. This Data Management and Information Governance Working Group will examine digital governance, with an eye toward the use of the Ostrom Frameworks.

The Working Group will be conducted both in person at the Ostrom Workshop on the IU Bloomington campus and online, via zoom. The Group will be an interactive one, with participants expected to be active in the groups agenda creation and monthly activities.

The Working Group is co-hosted by Angie Raymond, Director, Ostrom Workshop Data Management and Information Governance and Greg Bloom, 2019/20 Ostrom Visiting Scholar and the Founder of Open Referral which promotes open access to information about health, human, and social services.

If you have an interest in digital governance and are interested in getting involved in this group, please email Angie Raymond

Co-conveners: Prakash Kashwan, Insa Theesfeld, Sheila Foster, and Gustavo Garcia Lopez

Global and local commons are central to the intersecting challenges of climate change, sustainability, and resource degradation. While this has always been the case, questions of inequality and justice have gained greater significance in the present moment, in which the fate of global and local commons is tied together more strongly than ever before. For example, powerful actors seek to use local forest commons as sites for global restoration efforts or international carbon offset projects that are meant to stop the deterioration of global atmospheric commons. At the same time, because of the widespread reckoning with questions of justice and equity both global and local commons present new opportunities for justice-centered resource stewardship.

The Ostrom Workshop Working Group on "Power, Inequality and Justice in the Commons" builds on the workshop tradition of institutional analysis to develop novel analytical approaches for a deeper understanding of issues of power, inequality, and justice in the commons. To do so, we engage with a plurality of theoretical and methodological approaches, including classical institutional analysis of the commons and interdisciplinary fields such as political economy, political ecology, agrarian studies, critical theory, development studies, and urban studies.

This working group will act as a hub of brainstorming, researching, and writing that both advances our knowledge and is relevant for policy-making, and citizen actions. It aims to build stronger bridges between the Ostrom Workshop and the members of International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC). We welcome early- and late- career scholars, scholar-activists, and other researchers to join us in this exciting new endeavor.

To join this working group, please fill out the following Google Form: https://forms.gle/zYFeyHqSwfSzE6F26

For more information, please contact Prakash Kashwan

Institutions of all sizes are being challenged from a wide array of both internal and external forces, including climate change, social divisions that are undermining trust, cyber attacks, and recently threats to public health. This working group will engage with the literature on resilience and trust as informed by the Ostrom tradition to seek out new grant and research opportunities.

Contacts:
Scott Shackelford (sjshacke@indiana.edu)
Janet McCabe (jgmccabe@iu.edu)

The Ostroms’ work has been adapted to a wide range of sectors and disciplines, from fisheries and forests to climate change and, more recently, the final frontier. There’s a growing literature on applying polycentric principles to space governance, and more broadly addressing collective action problems including orbital debris and space weaponization – here’s an example.

Given recent developments including constellations of satellites going up on scarce orbits, and even asteroid mining, this group will explore current work in this field and seek out opportunities for collaboration including with Université Laval, in Québec, Canada.

To learn about future meetings, please join the mailing list.

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Affiliates

Commons Governance Program

Artistic Inspiration and the Commons Working Group

Digital Governance Working Group

Power, Inequality and Justice in the Commons Working Group

Resilience of Institutions Working Group

Space Governance Working Group

Ostrom Workshop

Ostrom Workshop social media channels -test