![In Common](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/4878906/IC_logo_jpeg_pjkfsa.jpg)
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In Common explores 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, conservation and development, social-ecological resilience, and sustainability.
Episodes
![Science and Practice #7: Questioning Conservation with Sarah Milne](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog4878906/Sarah_Milne_profile_picture_huwbur_300x300.jpg)
Monday Jan 30, 2023
Science and Practice #7: Questioning Conservation with Sarah Milne
Monday Jan 30, 2023
Monday Jan 30, 2023
In this episode, Michael speaks with Sarah Milne, a senior lecturer at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University about her recent book, “Corporate Nature: An Insider’s Ethnography of Global Conservation”.
In the book, Sarah recounts her experience with a conservation policy implemented in the Cardamom mountains of Cambodia by a major international environmental NGO, Conservation International. This policy is called a Conservation Agreement, and it is a type of payment for ecosystem services, or PES, policy. These involve an external actor paying a local resource user as an individual or a group to incentivize them to provide important public goods, in this case forest conservation. Sarah describes how the new conservation agreement model developed within Conservation International and how it grew into a corporate product to be applied in a range of contexts. Sarah worked on the ground in Cambodia as this policy was implemented, and describes the challenges it met when the simplifying theory and requirements of the model confronted political and ecological complexity in the field. An important point that Sarah makes is that we need to worry less about the promotion of a particular model and more about developing an “ethics of practice”.
Website: https://crawford.anu.edu.au/people/academic/sarah-milne
References:
Milne, S. 2022. Corporate Nature: An Insider’s Ethnography of Global Conservation. University of Arizona Press.
![Insight Episode #48: Daniel Decaro on self-determination theory](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/4878906/IC_logo_jpeg_pjkfsa_300x300.jpg)
Friday Jan 27, 2023
Insight Episode #48: Daniel Decaro on self-determination theory
Friday Jan 27, 2023
Friday Jan 27, 2023
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
![Science and Practice #6: Learning from policy failures in development economics with Soumya Balasubramanya](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog4878906/Soumya_Balasumbramanya_htzbh9_300x300.jpeg)
Tuesday Jan 24, 2023
Tuesday Jan 24, 2023
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.
![112: Reimagining narratives of death and extinction with Dr. Sarah Bezan](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog4878906/UCC_profile_picture_9ruvpn_300x300.jpg)
Monday Jan 16, 2023
112: Reimagining narratives of death and extinction with Dr. Sarah Bezan
Monday Jan 16, 2023
Monday Jan 16, 2023
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:
- “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).
- “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.
- “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.
- Animal Remains. Co-edited by Sarah Bezan and Robert McKay. Routledge Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture Series. London: Routledge, 2022.
- “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.
- Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
- Jørgensen, Dolly. “Endling, the Power of the Last in an Extinction-Prone World.” Environmental Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2017): 119–38.
![Science and Practice #5: Radical Alternatives to Development with Ashish Kothari](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog4878906/AK_in_Llanchamacocha_Amazon_heavier_crop_r2s9ef_300x300.jpg)
Wednesday Jan 11, 2023
Science and Practice #5: Radical Alternatives to Development with Ashish Kothari
Wednesday Jan 11, 2023
Wednesday Jan 11, 2023
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/
![Insight Episode #47: Nejem Raheem on water rights in the New Mexico acequias](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog4878906/Screenshot_2023-01-06_at_6_47_03_PM_rjnvp7_300x300.png)
Friday Jan 06, 2023
Insight Episode #47: Nejem Raheem on water rights in the New Mexico acequias
Friday Jan 06, 2023
Friday Jan 06, 2023
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.
![Insight Episode #46: Arun Agrawal on top down v. bottom up governance](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog4878906/arun-agrawal-portrait-1_300x300.jpeg)
Friday Dec 16, 2022
Insight Episode #46: Arun Agrawal on top down v. bottom up governance
Friday Dec 16, 2022
Friday Dec 16, 2022
This insight episode comes from full episode eighty with Arun Agrawal.
Arun is the Samuel Trask Dana Professor at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan, and he has played an important role in the development of the Commons field and related areas of conservation and development.
Arun talks with Michael and Stefan about top-down versus bottom-up governance, and how people’s identity informs how they view the world. Arun also discusses how comanagement is not just a category, but a descriptor of the world around us, and the importance of understanding nuance rather than looking for binaries.
Arun’s website: http://www.arunagrawal.org/
![111: Fisheries policy and catch shares with Dan Holland](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog4878906/dan-holland-noaa-nwfsc_300x300.jpg)
Tuesday Dec 13, 2022
111: Fisheries policy and catch shares with Dan Holland
Tuesday Dec 13, 2022
Tuesday Dec 13, 2022
In this episode, Michael speaks with Dan Holland. Dan is a senior scientist at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center within the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. Dan joined the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in 2010. Prior to that he held positions with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the New Zealand Seafood Industry Council, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. He is 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 is a former President of the International Institute for Fisheries Economics and Trade (IIFET).
Michael and Dan talked about several aspects of Dan’s research, which is focused primarily on design and evaluation of fishery management tools and strategies. In particular, they discussed Dan’s research related to catch share policy, which involves placing a cap on the total allowable catch (TAC) for a species and a distributing a tradeable quota that is allocated to a group of fishers in proportion to this cap. These policies have been both quite popular and controversial, and Dan’s research can help us think about the mechanics of some of the most critical issues involved, including how to balance the costs and benefits of individual vs. collective fishing rights, options for limiting bycatch and dealing with choke species via quota pooling, and how to these relate to the idea of ecosystem management.
Dan’s website: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/contact/dan-s-holland-phd
References:
Holland, Daniel S. 2010. “Markets, Pooling and Insurance for Managing Bycatch in Fisheries.” Ecological Economics: The Journal of the International Society for Ecological Economics 70 (1): 121–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2010.08.015.
Holland, Daniel S. 2013. “Making Cents Out of Barter Data from the British Columbia Groundfish ITQ Market.” Marine Resource Economics 28 (4): 311–30. https://doi.org/10.5950/0738-1360-28.4.311.
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.
Holland, Daniel S., Joshua K. Abbott, and Karma E. Norman. 2020. “Fishing to Live or Living to Fish: Job Satisfaction and Identity of West Coast Fishermen.” Ambio 49 (2): 628–39. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-019-01206-w.
Holland, Daniel S., Cameron Speir, Juan Agar, Scott Crosson, Geret DePiper, Stephen Kasperski, Andrew W. Kitts, and Larry Perruso. 2017. “Impact of Catch Shares on Diversification of Fishers’ Income and Risk.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114 (35): 9302–7. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1702382114.
![IJC#10: Picking a bone with Elinor Ostrom? A conversation with Landon Yoder & Courtney Hammond Wagner](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog4878906/20221121_Landon_Yoder_Courtney_Hammond_Wagner_-_picture_Landon_Courtney72zhl_300x300.jpg)
Monday Dec 05, 2022
Monday Dec 05, 2022
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?
![110: Carbon markets with Danny Cullenward](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog4878906/Cullenward_-_photo_jc4di3_300x300.jpg)
Monday Nov 28, 2022
110: Carbon markets with Danny Cullenward
Monday Nov 28, 2022
Monday Nov 28, 2022
In this episode, Michael speaks with Danny Cullenward. Danny is a lawyer and climate economist working on the design and implementation of scientifically grounded climate policy. He is the Policy Director at CarbonPlan and a Research Fellow at American University’s Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy. He holds a PhD and a JD from Stanford University.
Danny talks with Michael about his book, Making Climate Policy Work , which he co-authored with David Victor. In this book, Danny and David critique the dominance of carbon markets in the climate change policy space. They argue that such markets are layered onto existing regulations that are doing most of the work to mitigate carbon emissions. A central challenge that markets face is that their implementation is highly political and often coopted by those who are regulated.
Danny and David also discuss carbon offset policies, which is essentially a payment for ecosystem services scheme that is often added to carbon market policies to provide regulated actors with an option to pay for carbon sequestration elsewhere to enable them to keep polluting where they are, with the presumption that the carbon budget can balance out. Danny and David are also critical of these, in particular due to their lack of additionality, or the lack of credible proof that the carbon sequestration being paid for is occurring because of the offset program and wouldn’t have happened without it. Danny and Michael conclude the conversation by talking about the future of voluntary carbon markets and the promise of carbon removal technologies.
Carbon Plan website: https://carbonplan.org/
References:
Cullenward, Danny, and David G. Victor. 2020. Making Climate Policy Work. Polity Press.
Badgley, Grayson, Jeremy Freeman, Joseph J. Hamman, Barbara Haya, Anna T. Trugman, William R. L. Anderegg, and Danny Cullenward. 2022. “Systematic over-Crediting in California’s Forest Carbon Offsets Program.” Global Change Biology 28 (4): 1433–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15943 (open access)
Propublica reporting on Badgley et al. (2022) article: