Enclosure and Dispossession of the Agrarian Commons in Bolivia, Ethiopia, and Mexico
* Article/Chapter: Struggles over the commons: Between enclosures and commoning. IN: ENTITLE (eds.) Political Ecology for Civil Society (Chapter 3, pp. 83-93). By Jonah Wedekind and Gustavo Garcia-Lopez.
Description
"The chapter approaches interrelated civic and ecological commons emphasising they have become a symbol for grassroots practices from different domains, seeking to collectively organise, sustain or innovate around common resource access and use etc., but have also been contested by acts towards establishing property rights for the purposes of free markets or states.
The chapter explains the concept of commons both as a type of resource or good, such as a forest, an urban garden, a fishery, water in an agricultural irrigation system or in a city, an open-source digital software or a knowledge database such as Wikipedia; and as the collective governance arrangements devised by groups of people (“commoners”) for managing, conserving, producing and reproducing these resources or goods. We review “commoning” as the process of producing and sustaining over time these collective governance arrangements as well as the common resources. Through this chapter we review the declination of the commons in different disciplines and deepen the approach offered by political ecology, looking particularly into processes of commons’ enclosures and the role of social movement in putting the commons at the centre of democracy.
The chapter offers three case studies: the case of the enclosure and dispossession of the commons in Bolivia as part of historical, resource-based processes of capital accumulation; the unique case of community forest governance in Mexico as a living example of the commons and its challenges; and a short history of how different types of land grabbing of agricultural land under different political regimes (imperialism, socialism and neoliberal-developmentalism) all had the same effect of enclosing the commons in Ethiopia." (https://www.academia.edu/30991172/Struggles_over_the_commons_Between_enclosures_and_commoning._IN_ENTITLE_eds._Political_Ecology_for_Civil_Society_Chapter_3_pp._83-93_?)