Infiltrating commoning practices in local environmental governance

• In the current consume-and-discard society and the commoditization and privatisation of public space in cities, citizen-driven initiatives, are developing new practices in an attempt to resisting high-consumption lifestyles, addressing green political consumption practices (Halkier 2009, Hargreaves 2011) and seeking less and more careful consumption. Food networks (Levkoe and Wakefield 2013), time banking (Laamanen et al. 2015), or urban food farming (Doberning and Stagl 2015), have been outlined as part of new social movements such as voluntary simplicity (Grigsby 2004, Alexander and Ussher 2012), anti-consumption (Portwood-Stacer 2012), transition town (Scott-Cato and Hillier 2010), do-it-your-self, open-source urbanism (Bradley, 2015) and lifestyle (Haenfler et al. 2012) movements. The rationales underlying these movements are broad, ranging from anti-capitalist ideology, minimalism, and frugality (Evans 2011) to a culture of thrift and material constraints (Gregson et al. 2013). Still, they all share a radical, though often implicit and superficially unthreatening, critique of the surfeit of materials and consumption in affluent societies (Czarniawska and Löfgren 2014), and the corporate domination in production and consumption (Bradley, 2014). Unlike other environmental movements these initiatives challenge a privatised and commoditized urban development, not through overt confrontation with political institutions but through their everyday practices. Cooking food recovered from food store dumpsters in an open public party, or transforming a parking slot into a temporary park (Bradley, 2015), become into political actions whereby citizens express political and moral concerns without engaging in conventional activism (Zapata Campos and Zapata, forthcoming). But even more importantly. Through their practices, these movements develop the ability to reinvent, appropriate, and provide urban commons - such as repaired bikes, second-hand clothes or recovered food – by transforming private assets and space, on their own terms, as an alternative to market and State (Ostrom, 1990). The paper contributes to current efforts to expand social movement and organization studies theories (e.g. Diani and Bison 2004, Della Porta and Diani 2006, Sheinberg and Lounsbury, 2008) with the urban commons literature (e.g. Ostrom, 1990, Harvey, 2012, Borch and Kornberger, 2015) to answer the following question: What organisational practices driven by citizen initiatives govern the creation of urban commons and bring about socio-environmental change through mainstream institutions? The paper is informed by citizen-driven initiatives involved in sustainable consumption and waste prevention practices in the city of Göteborg, initiatives targeting, for example food waste recovery (i.e. the food-recovery project driven by university students and the social entrepreneur ALLWIN), creating common reuse spaces in housing blocks (i.e. Free Boutique), exchanging used toys (i.e. Retoy), establishing bicycle repair workshop (Bicycle Kitchen), and the organization of bicycle Re-Cycle days by a student association. The next section introduces the literature on the governance of commons and social movement theory and presents the theoretical framework used in analysing the case. The methods used to collect and analyse the data are then presented, followed by a description of citizen-driven waste prevention initiatives in Göteborg. The findings are discussed to explore how these initiatives succeeded in mobilizing material resources, transforming them into commons. The paper ends up with a concluding discussion around the ability of these commoning practices to infiltrate and shape local environmental governance.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap -- Studier av offentlig förvaltning (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science -- Public Administration Studies (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Företagsekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Business Administration (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology (hsv//eng)

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