Sustaining Commons: Sustaining our Future

13^th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Commons (IASC)

Theme: Sustaining Commons: Sustaining our Future

January 10-14, 2011 Hyderabad, India
Hosted by the Foundation for Ecological Security www.iasc2011.fes.org.in
Chaired by: Mr. Nitin Desai, Co-Chair: Jagdeesh Puppala

The 13^th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) will be held in Hyderabad, India from January 10^th to 14^th, 2011. The Conference is being held in South Asia for the first time, hosted by a practitioner organization – Foundation for Ecological Security (FES). The Conference is not only a platform for furthering scholarship and debates centered around Commons, but also a space where practitioners, policy makers and researchers from across the world enrich the collective understanding on common property resources and identify areas and measures to inform policy and programmatic action as well as guide future research.

IASC 2011 will explore ways to sustain common property resources and Commons for the coming generations in the wake of ever increasing threats of privatization of collective assets and an increasing trend of atomization of rural and urban societies. The Conference will take a critical look at the interface between human and natural systems, Commons in particular, to build on our understanding on the elements and interconnectedness that sustain life, collective action and our future. On the one hand, the Conference will attempt is to bring in emerging theoretical and empirical work on managing common resources and examine the mechanisms to govern Commons (including New Commons); on the other, it will also bring to surface the questions that practitioners and policy makers face on the ground and in shaping public policy.

The Conference will contribute rich lessons and principles for managing local, complex, as well as global Commons such as international arrangements to respond to climate change. Furthermore, rather than being an event in itself, the Conference will be a part of a much larger process that involves regular engagement with government and non-government entities across the country. These engagements will culminate in a set of concrete recommendations that will feed into the preparation of the 12th Five Year Plan of India.

The Conference will be organized in seven sub-themes:

1. The Commons, Poverty and Social Exclusion;
2. Governance of the Commons: Decentralization, Property Rights, Legal Framework, Structure and Organization;
3. The Commons: Theory, Analytics and Data;
4. Globalisation, Commercialisation and the Commons;
5. Managing the Global Commons: Climate Change and other Challenges;
6. Managing Complex Commons (Lagoons, Protected Areas, Wetlands, Mountain Areas, Rangelands, Coastal Commons);
7. New Commons (Digital Commons, Genetic Commons, Patents, Music, Literature etc);

Proposals for papers, thematic panels, videos and posters are due March 31^st 2010. All abstracts must be submitted electronically via the conference website. For additional information and guidelines visit: www.iasc2011.fes.org.in