In Common

093: Complexity and the Subaks of Bali with Steve Lansing

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.

Insight Episode #35: Jessica Gephart on seafood trade discrepancies

This insight episode comes from full episode 052, Michael and Stefan's conversation with Jessica Gephart. 

 

Jessica is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science at American University. Her research focuses on feedbacks between globalized food systems and the environment. 

 

In this episode, Jessica talks with Michael and Stefan about how the different ways that seafood catch and commodities are reported leads to discrepancies in trade data numbers, and the complexity of untangling the different trade pathways to get a clearer picture of global seafood trade. 

 

Jessica's website: http://www.jessicagephart.com 

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 

092: Sustainable development with Kaitlin Cordes

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.

091: Marine conservation in Haiti with Jean Wiener

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

IJC#5: Guiding would-be institutional crafters with Jim Sinner

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).

 

Insight #34: Beatriz Dos Santos Dias on modeling and historical ecology

This insight episode comes from full episode 051, Michael's conversation with Beatriz Dos Santos Dias. 

Beatriz is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Beatriz was part of the Modelling and Stock Assessment of Prince William Sound Herring in the Gulf of Alaska, and she is currently exploring the effects of regime shifts in the Gulf of Alaska Marine food webs. 

In this episode, Beatriz talks with Michael about models, specifically their value in informing policy, and the importance of a historical perspective in ecological research.

Beatriz's website: https://www.biadias.com/home 

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

090: Histories of disease and its links to urban planning with Aditya Ramesh

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

089: Biocultural relationships with Noa Kekuewa Lincoln

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

IJC #4: Historical commons in the Low Lands with Maurice Paulissen

Frank van Laerhoven is speaking with Maurice Paulissen.

Is it a historian? Is it an ecologist? No, it is a landscape historian! Maurice is one of the many commons scholars that cannot be easily categorized by means of a disciplinary label. He is also an exponent of a long tradition within our domain of researchers for whom “going to the field” means “going to an archive” and that manage to reconstruct commons governance 500 or more years back. 

Maurice co-authored an IJC publication entitled ‘Dire Necessity or Mere Opportunity? Recurrent Peat Commercialisation from Raised Bog Commons in the Early Modern Low Countries’ together with Roy van Beek, Serge Nekrassoff, Edward Huijbens, and Theo Spek.

The episode starts with an half-hearted attempt to pin down Maurice in terms of academic disciplines (an attempt that partly fails). It then continues with a reflection on the article that served as an excuse for the conversation. That article contests the simplistic notion that in early modern Europe, shared resource management solutions offered by markets or governments were not sufficiently reliable, and therefore fell into the lap of autonomous communities. It is convincingly shown that markets (both local and regional), governments (at various levels, in various forms) and more or less autonomous communities play competing and complementary roles in the governance of peat land – roles that vary over time and place. The conversation ends with a reflection on whether a study of commons governance 500 years ago can be useful for commoners, today.

For more analyses of historical commons, also check out the following IJC titles:

• Laborda-Pemán, M., & De Moor, T. (2016). History and the commons: a necessary conversation. International Journal of the Commons, 10(2).
• Farjam, M., De Moor, T., van Weeren, R., Forsman, A., Dehkordi, M. A. E., Ghorbani, A., & Bravo, G. (2020). Shared patterns in long-term dynamics of commons as institutions for collective action. International Journal of the Commons, 14(1).
• Takahashi, T., Matsushita, K., Yoshida, Y., & Senda, T. (2019). Impacts of 150 years of modernization policies on the management of common forests in Japan: a statistical analysis of micro census data. International Journal of the Commons, 13(2).
• Echegaray, E. P. (2011). Communities and sustainability in medieval and early modern Aragon, 1200-1600. International Journal of the Commons, 5(2).
• Chanda, S., Patnaik, A., & Chatterjee, S. C. (2021). The Courtesan Project and the Tawa’ifs’ Cultural Commons. International Journal of the Commons, 15(1).
• Castro, Á. C. (2021). Early Medieval Commons? Or How the History of Early Medieval Europe Could Benefit from a Necessary Conversation: The Case From NW Iberia. International Journal of the Commons, 15(1).

088: Institutional and behavioral economics with Achim Schlüter

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/