This book promotes the well-being of the commons through representation and accountability through monitoring from below in order to operationalize engagement. This book views the commons as a legal concept, a transformative governance concept, and a basis for systemic ethics. The chapters focus on practical responses to address complex problems that comprise many interrelated variables and are perceived differently by stakeholders with different values and life experiences. By considering these different stakeholders, the goal is to highlight ways to regenerate and invigorate employment opportunities. The book identifies pathways towards ethical vocational education to enable lifelong engagement by active citizens which requires action learning to address areas of perceived policy concern. Throughout the chapters in this book, the authors discuss transformative research and its implications on stakeholders. They focus on re-presentation and its implications for thinking and practice. One author makes the case for fostering non anthropocentric approaches to ethical development. In addition, the chapters cover case studies including governance challenges associated with water management using a mixed method approach and also production of mushrooms in collaboration with coffee growers in Jakarta. The book focuses on ways to de-colonialise knowledge formation in public policy and makes the case for an alternative approach to governance and democracy that takes into account a range of local people’s perspectives.

Given the new-found importance of the commons in current political discourse, it has become increasingly necessary to explore the democratic, institutional, and legal implications of the commons for global governance today. This book analyses and explores the ground-breaking model of the commons and its relation to these debates.

Tackles one of the most enduring and contentious issues of positive political economy: common pool resource management.

The rising tide of globalization poses a direct threat to the viability of small communities worldwide. Such communities, however, are our greatest hope for sustainable environmental governance, as they possess unparalleled ability to directly manage common-pool resources. Providing a much needed antidote in this age of globalization, this volume advances the idea of collaborative governance as an integration of open and closed commons. Taking into consideration the dimension of conflict resolution, it studies examples of governance structures in various countries around the world to develop a new type of democracy towards multilevel environmental governance that involves the public, private, and commons spheres. With contributions from researchers in a wide variety of disciplines, this volume demonstrates through institutional and empirical analyses the essential role of local commons in providing an axis of resistance to increasing environmental devastation and social inequality towards creating a sustainable future for local communities as well as society at large.

Transformation from Wall Street to Well-being: Joining up the dots through Participatory democracy and governance to mitigate the causes and adapt to the effects of climate change addresses accountable leadership, supports collective interests, ethical governance and fairness to future generations in order to develop systemic approaches relevant to these issues. The humanistic focus, whilst central, addresses how we see ourselves in relation to the environment. It explores cultural perspectives in developed and developing parts of the world where people have a closer connection with the natural environment in comparison to those who live in cities. Furthermore the book discusses participatory action research to prefigure a means to hold the market to ensure that the use of resources that are necessary for the common good are accessible and equitable. The essential systemic aim this book offers is to balance human needs with nature. The research summarizes the discourses and the adaptive praxis in order to develop a bridge between cosmopolitan ethics and cosmopolitan governance. It does this in the interest of supporting and using cultural designs for living that support quality of life and spans five core domains as explained by the author. Overall, this monograph helps evaluates the extent to which the introduced approaches enable the community to consider their perceived assets and risks and the implications of their consumption choices.

This volume provides an overview of global environmental governance and the effectiveness of different governance mechanisms. Bringing together a broad range of perspectives, it addresses key challenges in contemporary global governance of environmental change.

Garrett Hardin's seminal essay "The Tragedy of the Commons" appeared in 1968 and has been at the center of the debate on commonly owned ground or resources such as Western public grazing or the oceans. This is the second edition of a book exploring the issues raised in Hardin's essay. As scarce resources are increasingly strained. It is ever more crucial to identify those resources which are held in common and are therefore prone to "tragic" waste and abuses. The essay in this volume focus on alternate institutional approaches to managing these resources to prevent such tragedy.

'One of the most important books I've read in years' Brian Eno We are losing the commons. Austerity and neoliberal policies have depleted our shared wealth; our national utilities have been sold off to foreign conglomerates, social housing is almost non-existent, our parks are cordoned off for private events and our national art galleries are sponsored by banks and oil companies. This plunder deprives us all of our common rights, recognized as far back as the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest of 1217, to share fairly and equitably in our public wealth. Guy Standing leads us through a new appraisal of the commons, stemming from the medieval concept of common land reserved in ancient law from marauding barons, to his modern reappraisal of the resources we all hold in common - a brilliant new synthesis that crystallises quite how much public wealth has been redirected to the 1% in recent decades through the state-approved exploitation of everything from our land to our state housing, health and benefit systems, to our justice system, schools, newspapers and even the air we breathe. Plunder of the Commons proposes a charter for a new form of commoning, of remembering, guarding and sharing that which belongs to us all, to slash inequality and soothe our current political instability.

The predicament of uncontrolled growth in a finite world puts the global commons Ð such as oceans, atmosphere, and biosphere Ð at risk. So far, states have not found the means to protect what, essentially, is outside their jurisdiction. However, the ju