Toward a postcapitalist feminist political ecology’ approach to the commons and commoning

Abstract

Feminist scholars are deeply involved in current global debates surrounding natural resource management. Looking at feminists' engagement through the entry point of the commons and commoning, feminists' voices are diverse. Somewhat separate from feminist discussions on the commons and commoning, scholars of postcapitalist community economies have recently linked their scholarship to the study of the commons and commoning. This essay expands feminist political ecology's approaches to the study of the commons and commoning by integrating some insights from existing eco-and autonomist Marxist feminisms as well as postcapitalist community economies. We first discuss a postcapitalist feminist political ecology's perspective. After introducing our site and methods, we explore the productivity of this framework through an examination of the case of a women-led cooperative that has been producing agave syrup in rural Mexico for the last two decades. To conclude, we discuss several insights this approach may offer for transformative politics.

Feminist political ecologies of the commons and commoning (Editorial to the Special Feature)

“…Some FPE scholars 1 have integrated the postcapitalist politics articulated by Gibson-Graham (2006), but there is still a lack of strong class analysis within FPE where scholars do not often examine class processes when analyzing neoliberal political economy or only highlight capitalist class processes and fail to see viable non-capitalist processes in the economy (Bauhardt and Harcourt 2019). FPE still needs to learn how to read the economy for difference in order to open up possibilities for more just futures through commoning practices can be imagined (Sato and Soto Alarcón 2019).…”

“…Two notable emerging lines push FPE's multiscale and multispace approaches further. 2 One line of investigation draws on non-dualistic concepts, such as naturecultures (Haraway 2008) or socionature (Braun 2002;Nightingale 2019), new materialism and material feminism (see Elmhirst 2015), and queer ecologies (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010) along with other posthumanist theories (see examples of multispecies commoning by Sato and Soto Alarcón 2019). Another line explores commons types beyond the biophysical.…”

“…Another line explores commons types beyond the biophysical. Three contributions in this issue (Harcourt 2019;Sato and Soto Alarcón 2019;Tummers and MacGregor 2019) illuminate links between biophysical and non-biophysical commons. Harcourt and Tummers and MacGregor articulate spaces, higher education classroom and co-housing respectively, as a potential site for commoning.…”

Urban commons to private property: Gendered environments in Mumbai’s fisher communities

“…The state has, in numerous settings, played an important role in regulating commons and facilitating their enclosure (Mansfield, 2004). Within the ambit of scholarship examining contemporary processes of enclosing rural and peri-urban commons (see White et al., 2012 for overview) and their gendered dimensions (Sato and Alarcón, 2019; White and White, 2012), development sociologist Michael Levien’s (2012) work in northwestern India is important here—in showing how the neoliberal state has acted as a land broker and enclosed diverse property forms for capitalist investors. While the Indian nation-state has used eminent domain to procure land since the end of British colonialism, the neoliberal iteration marks a shift from obtaining land for ostensibly public purposes to the state acting merely (and transparently) as an intermediary for the private sector.…”

Political ecology 1: From margins to center

“…Drawing from feminist ethics that foregrounds research processes, politics, outcomes, and impacts, rather than deploying the universal god trick of seeing from nowhere (Haraway, 1988), FPE is cognizant of praxis and power relations. The production of knowledge and systems are questioned and unraveled in FPE while at the same time exploring new forms of solidarities and collectivities (Harcourt, 2019; Jarosz, 2011; Sato and Soto Alarcón, 2019). Studying and working with collectivities and movements have been central to FPE scholarship.…”