1 Introduction

The most widespread body of knowledge around the commons comes from the theory of the commons. The theory, which has also been associated to the idea of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), has traditionally relied on economic theory to understand whether and how local communities are able to design and change rules that promote cooperation and collective management of shared resources (i.e., commons). The theory has become one of the best-known theories of governance within ecological economics.Footnote 1 Over time, however, the theory has also received critiques and co-evolved with them. Relevant for this chapter are the critiques raised for its relative inattention to how historically shaped patterns of power, conflict, the “state”, and the broader political-economic context shape the access to and uses of common resources, and CBNRM regimes (Johnson, 2004; Saunders, 2014).

The “critical commons” literature has focused on the political nature of commons initiatives as solutions to ecological distribution conflicts and their entanglements with environmental justice movements (for a review of different approaches Villamayor-Tomas & García-López, 2021); as well as on exploring how the commons can develop a path of emancipation from capitalism by building an alternative mode of production to the state and the market (Caffentzis & Federici, 2014). This literature has questioned the managerial emphasis of the theory of the commons, pointing instead to how state’s policies led by private and corporate interests have often tried to privatize (i.e., enclose) commons to grab the value commoners produce and boost the capital accumulation process; and how marginalized and resource-dependent populations have mobilized to defend Commons and livelihoods around them.

While the former line of research builds on Marxist analysis of enclosure (De Angelis, 2001), the latter connects with Joan Martínez Alier’s materialist approach to environmental conservation. Since the beginning of the 2000s, Martínez-Alier has challenged the post-materialist hypothesis according to which environmental protection and values emerge only among those people that have already secured their high material standard of life (Inglehart, 2000). He contrasted this environmentalism of the wealthy North with that of marginalized, particularly indigenous and peasant communities in the global South, who struggle to defend the environment, not for its own sake, but as their source of material livelihood, health, and identity. Here, we build and expand this approach to make our case for commons movements.

In the next section, we elaborate on how Martínez Alier’s environmentalism of the poor thesis was not far at all from that of early commons scholars, and Elinor Ostrom in particular. In Sect. 19.3, we first introduce the Barcelona School’s approach to the commons and elaborate what we identify as its three main themes: commons and movements (Sect. 19.3.1), urban commons in crisis/transitions (Sect. 19.3.2), processes of commoning (Sect. 19.3.3), and commons and degrowth (Sect. 19.3.4). In Sect. 19.4, we conclude with some thoughts on the future directions of this approach and themes.

2 Communalism and Commons: Tangential Parkours

Part of the work of Martínez-Alier can be traced back to his experience in Peru in the 1970s during the agrarian reform years. Building on his contributions to the Agrarian Archives, he wrote “Los Huacchilleros del Perú” (1973) on the resistance of pastoral communities to being dispossessed from their lands. Influential during these years were works like Florencia Mallon’s The Defence of Community in Peru’s Central Highlands as well as writings from Russian intellectuals around the pre-revolutionary Narodnik movement, which advocated for an agrarian socialism around the autonomy of local communities. Thus, Martínez-Alier was not alien to the “defense of the commons”, understood as the struggles of local agricultural communities to defend their lands, and epitomized early experiences of organized agrarianism, or communalism, that followed the Zapatista revolution in Latin America or the early anarchist movement in Spain (personal communication). From this perspective, the real tragedy of the commons was not overuse, but that of enclosures, or the encroachment and accumulation of land by big landowners with the sponsoring of governments.

The empirical evidence used both by early commons scholars like Ostrom and political ecologists like Martínez-Alier was quite similar and included historical and anthropological accounts of the self-organization experiences of relatively autonomous local communities around for the management and defense of their resources (see for example the works by Kurien (1991) on community-based fishing organizations and their resistance to the encroachment of their fishing grounds by commercial trawlers). More importantly, both groups of scholars understood the intricate connections between the material well-being of resource-dependent communities and their stakes and capacity to collectively manage and defend those resources (Villamayor-Tomas & García-López, 2018). In a way, they looked at two sides of the same coin.

Ostrom, like other early commons scholars, was concerned about justice issues. In this sense, it could be argued that they were also political ecologists ante litteram. Much of the work around the theory of the commons aimed to demystify traditional economic theories that advocated for state control or privatization under the assumption of unavoidably uncooperative local natural resource user groups. Accordingly, the theory of the commons and Ostrom’s core legacy in particular is based on countless empirical examples of the ability of natural resource-dependent communities to overcome rivalry and create rules for sustainable management (Forsyth & Johnson, 2014). In turn, Martínez-Alier showed how these same commoners had self-organized to defend their lands, livelihoods, and health against fight exclusionary policies and development and conservation schemes that dispossessed them from their resources.

3 The Barcelona School: An Agenda Around the Commons

In this section, we present four themes and associated initiatives that are representative of the Barcelona School approach to the commons: commons movements, urban commons, commoning, and degrowth. These are linked to various projects that have been (co)led by Barcelona School scholars, of which we highlight three: the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJ Atlas and Transform-EJ projects), the Barcelona the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE), the Research & Degrowth (R&D) Collective and the PROCOMÚ (PROCOMMON) project. The EJ Atlas is a collaborative mapping of environmental conflicts co-coordinated by J Martínez-Alier, along with Leah Temper, Daniela Del Bene, Arnim Scheidel, Sara Mingorría, Brototi Roy, Marta Conde, Mariana Walter, and Grettel Navas, among others (see Temper et al., 2018).Footnote 2 Members have carried out important research on the relation between EJ movements and commons (see Villamayor-Tomas et al., 2022 for a recent compilation). ENTITLE is a Marie Curie Training Network (ITN) that ran until 2015 and has continued in the work of the Undisciplined Environments political ecology blog (previously the ENTITLE blog).Footnote 3 The commons were one of the project’s key themes, as reflected in one of its main outputs: the Political Ecology for Civil Society manual (Beltrán et al., 2015; also Andreucci et al., 2017). The R&D Collective has led discussions connecting commons with degrowth. R&D members’ Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era (D’Alisa et al., 2015a) included the commons as a keyword in an essay written by commons scholar-activists David Bollier and Silke Helfrich. The collective’s Masters Program in Political Ecology also features the commons as a central topic.Footnote 4The PROCOMÚ project, co-led by ICTA and the Institute for Government and Public Policy (IGOP-UAB), has focused on developing an inventory and better categorizing the myriad of citizen-based initiatives that have emerged over the last decades and since the 2008 economic crisis in Barcelona. Finally, the COMOVE project focused on unveiling the synergies and trade-offs between social movements and commons management projects, resulting in a workshop and special issue (Villamayor-Tomas et al., 2022) and several other publications (Villamayor-Tomas & García-López, 2018, 2021).

3.1 Commons Movements

In the last decade, scholars with good understanding of both the institutional and critical theories of the commons, have been documenting how the contentious politics of resource users and their allies contribute to advance rights to commons (e.g., Becker et al., 2017; Kashwan, 2017). To some extent, they have continued a thread started by political ecologists working in the interface of anti-extractive resistance movements and autonomism, self-management, and communalism, reflected in concepts such as “environmentalism of the poor” (Martínez-Alier, 2003; Guha & Martínez-Alier, 2013), “grassroots livelihood” movements (Peet & Watts, 1996), “ecological resistance movements” and “popular environmentalism” (Taylor, 1995; Goldman, 1998), “place-based/territorial resistances” (Escobar, 1998), and “local sites of resistance” (Blaikie, 2006).

Scholars associated with the Barcelona School have pioneered and expanded the study of the above “commons movements” as a distinctive type of social movement and commons-making experience (see Villamayor-Tomas & García-López, 2021 for an overview, and Navas et al., 2022 for recent applications to working-class communities and enviornmentalism). Common movements are defined as “politically active community projects that scale out within a territory and/or social mobilizations that materialize into practices of communal management, all aiming for a transformation toward a commons-based society” (pp. 513). Underlying this definition is the hypothesis that there is a cyclical relationship where movements provide impetus for institutional defense of the commons and of commons-based alternative projects, while commons are the social fabric through which movements’ demands, visions, and agendas for social and environmental justice, direct democracy and sustainability, can be materialized (De Angelis, 2017). This is particularly evident in the context of rural community-rights movements in the global South, as well as in new water and food commons movements and community energy movements in both the global South and North. Tensions and contradictions of commons-movement dynamics reflect trade-offs between diversity versus uniformization and organizational stability versus expansion of discourses and practices (Villamayor-Tomas & García-López, 2021).

Of relevance here is a special issue published on the topic, which compiles a diversity of cases all reflecting the prominence gained by the commons frame and the diversity of cases illustrating connections with social mobilization in both the rural and urban contexts (Villamayor-Tomas et al., 2022). As pointed out in the introduction of that Issue, there is a history of movements fighting to “reclaim the commons” since the alter-globalization struggles of the 1990s (see Klein, 2001); and a number of recent events including the World Social Forum, the European Commons Assembly, the “indignados” and “occupy” movements in Spain, Greece, and Turkey, or the water commons movements in Italy, Bolivia and elsewhere across the world, have reclaimed the commons as part of their overall agenda and/or grievances. In parallel, more practitioners have placed in the commons the hope to fulfill societal transformations for more democratic, equitable, and ecological lives, resulting in a variety of new agro-ecological food producers and consumer groups, integral cooperatives, urban gardens, community-energy projects, and peer-to-peer designs in cities and rural areas with shared practices and agendas; and in commons-based political platforms run by municipalities. In short, the commons are seen as having an “insurgent power” to advance a society that is “free, fair and alive” (Bollier & Helfrich, 2019).

The SI’s diversity of cases was complemented with the use of various combinations of established and emergent conceptual tools, ranging from institutional analysis and political ecology commons theories, to social movement approaches of political opportunities, framing, and transnational networks, to new tools such as collective (re)actions, liminal commons, management opportunity structures, and rooted water collectives to describe the type of organizations that embed both community. In a study of water, forest, and fisheries communities in Mexico and Sri Lanka, for example, Villamayor-Tomas et al. (2020) illustrate how movements can ensure the implementation of collective rights and facilitate the organization of local community organizations and federations of them. By the same token, however, mobilization can reinforce pre-existing divisions within CBNRM regimes; and the failure to mobilize or to achieve the goals of mobilization can trigger dynamics of cooperation defection in local commons governance. Dell’Angelo et al. (2021) offer a panoramic of movements that emerge in reaction to agribusinesses-related land acquisition and commons grabbing especially in the global South and analyze the different configurations of socio-environmental impacts, actors, and forms of protest, that emerge across different contexts. As they show, violent collective reactions employ a wide variety of protest strategies at multiple scales. Dupuits et al. (2020) in turn center on the opportunities and risks for local communities of “transnationalizing” their mobilizations. The authors do so through an analysis of the advocacy for international recognition of the rights to water and rights of nature, by the Latin-American Confederation of Community Organizations for Water Services and Sanitation (CLOSAS) and the Coordination of the Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA). As they point out, communities gain form of recognition of rights by linking their struggles at higher scales, yet this comes also at the cost of commensuration (i.e., of the diversity of local interests) and associated exclusionary tendencies.

Transversal to the above contributions and others included in the special issue is an interest in the coevolution of movements and commons, the role of heterogeneities, and cross-scalar dynamics. They have opened up, for example, new debates about the tension between commons as emergent, open, or “liminal” processes, and as long-lasting and more institutionalized collective projects (e.g, Varvarousis, 2020; Moreira & Morell Fuster, 2020); or the intended and unintended effects of state regulation on the emergence and consolidation of commons movements (Villamayor-Tomas et al., 2020); highlighted that divisions within communities and movements (e.g., around class-based vs. identity-based grievances, gender, or alliance-building strategies) are the norm rather the exception (e.g., Vos et al., 2020; Dell’Angelo et al., 2021; Tyagi & Das, 2020); or illustrated the ubiquity of scaling-up and out strategies and their opportunities and challenges (e.g., Dupuits et al., 2020; Pera, 2020).

3.2 Crisis, Urban Prosumer Groups, and Local Governments

Much of the interest in commons in the Barcelona School has also translated into works on “urban commons”, particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis in Europe, and the consequent emergence of the ‘movements of the squares’. Some of these works are tightly connected with the School’s interest in movements. Camps-Calvet et al. (2015), for example, rely on data collected from 27 urban community gardens in Barcelona to illustrate how they contribute to both building community resilience in times of crisis, and articulating forms of resistance to development pressure and commodified urban lifestyles (see also Calvet-Mir & March, 2019). Varvarousis (2020) focuses on commons-making in the context of crisis and broad social mobilizations, using the case study of Athens, Greece. Using the concepts of “liminality”, developed by Turner, and “rhizomatic”, developed by Deleuze and Guattari. He argues that during these periods, commoning is not just temporary, they do not “disappear” entirely even when it appears so. Rather, they are “liminal”, a rite of passage of sorts where commoning creates new social ties and commons projects, while also becoming disseminated across existing social networks. This expansion is “rhizomatic”: they can “facilitate transitions and may transform into or give rise to other, more stable, forms of commoning in their wake”. (Varvarousis, 2020: 5). Asara (2020) analyzes the commons as one of the elements of the “radical imaginary” of the Indignados in Madrid – together with autonomism and ecologism. And in comparing the experiences in Greece and Spain, Varvarousis et al. (2021) conclude that the commons were a prefigurative outcome from the movements of the squares.

Apostolopoulou and Kotsila (2021) also explore the making of commons in post-crisis and mobilization contexts in Hellinikon, Greece. Drawing on the theories of critical urban geographers and political ecologists (Harvey, Lefebvre, Smith, Heynen, Kaika, Swyngedouw), they argue that urban “guerrilla” gardening, as a process of commons-making, can gesture towards autogestion, which can embed and foment radical grassroots resistance for the right to the city, against neoliberalization of urban spaces and natures. Moreira and Morell Fuster (2020), for their part, focus on the life cycle and institutional arrangements of a food network that emerged from Porto’s solidarity economy movement. They use this to inquire about the nature of the new, post-2008 crisis commons in Portugal. As they show, the pre-existence of an ecosystem of local collectives and their leadership were key in the formation of the network and its organization around democratic values, the rejection of food as a commodity, and its openness regarding resources and knowledge.

Beyond connections with movements, others have more genuinely aimed at better conceptualizing urban commons and their relationship with local governments. By building on both institutional, critical, and Marxist scholarship, Ferreri et al. (forthcoming) propose a framework to distinguish urban commons from other social and solidarity economy initiatives, as prosumer groups with strong social and/or environmental transformation agendas and the ambition of constituting alternatives to state and market provision of services. Maestre et al. (forthcoming), in turn, point to the relative diversity of the more than 400 commons initiatives by Barcelona. As illustrated, the 5 clusters of commons initiatives, can be understood by looking at the sector whether they unfold, their social vs. environmental transformation ambition, and their connections with historical experiences of associationism in the city. Connections with local governments show that urban commons do not emerge in a vacuum of governance is well illustrated in Pera (2020) and her study of community socio-cultural centers reclaimed and then managed by local residents in Barcelona in the last decade. As she illustrates, there is a double-edged sword of local government’s support: even though local policies that promote and protect the commons represent an opportunity for them to flourish, the agreements established with the city council can limit the capacity for the commons to become alternative spaces for reinventing the city. Popartan et al. (2020) show how the discourses about water as commons (linked to rights, life, and democracy), emerged from the Water is Life movement in Barcelona, aligned with anti-privatization struggles in Latin America and the Indignados movement, and then became embedded in the municipal government’s left-populist identity. And Calvet-Mir & March, (2019), other Barcelona School scholars show the contradictory positions on how to govern water between different political actors within the municipal government, leading to a deadlock.

3.3 Performative Commons, Commoning and Becoming a Commoner

Barcelona School scholars have also been also involved in rethinking the commons. These scholars engage with a diversity of thinkersFootnote 5 to connect commons to other keywords such as praxis, counter-hegemony, performativity, prefigurative politics, (re)subjectification, liminality, insurgency, commonwealth, autonomy, self-management (autogestion), working-class or “commons” environmentalism, and communitarian weavings. These concepts contribute to expanding notions of commons beyond biophysical (material) or intangible “resources” or “goods”. Instead, they propose that “everything is a commons” (De Angelis, 2017): simultaneously a social fabric and a principle of the Earth as a shared living space on which we all depend, which is always collectively re/produced, always with consequences to others (human or non-human). Rather than commons as a thing, or a set of rules, these scholars emphasize that commons are networks of coevolving structures that connect social and ecological processes (D’Alisa, 2013); and that they are co-produced, made, and reclaimed through everyday practices, relations, subjectivities, and imaginaries of acting and being in common. Commons in this sense are the idea of commoning, which covers a good part of this understanding, is defined as the process of collectively making the commons, making ourselves in the process as commons subjects or “commoners”, shifting towards more equitable and ecological forms of relating to our environment. In this sense, commoning is a “performative” act – a practice which seeks to undo dominant relations and imaginaries or common senses, while being embedded within them (García-Lamarca, 2015; García-López et al., 2021; Velicu & García-López, 2018). It is, furthermore, seen as central to social struggles of communities in defense of their territories, as well as social movements seeking societal transformations. The commons, in other words, become the praxis and political vision of an equitable, deeply democratic, and ecologically sustainable society, “our horizon of peace, freedom and plenty” (De Angeils, 2017: 172).

The casuistic around commoning cases is growing rapidly (e.g., Bollier & Helfrich, 2015; Clement et al., 2019), also within the School. Caggiano and De Rosa (2015), building on De Angelis’s ideas on commoning and commons movements / social movement dynamics, illustrate the strategic alliances of environmental activists and social cooperatives in Napoli in their struggle to reclaim and reuse waste disposal lands from the Mafia’s in peri-urban areas. They highlight how, by creating new agricultural projects, they not only re-appropriate these land as a commons, but they start to “make community”, creating new social ties, cultural practices, and institutions as part of the struggle to shift from a mafia economy to a social-ecological economy. They thus provide an analysis of strategies and limits for a symbolic and practical project of commoning within environmental justice movements, as part of strategies of remaking their territory.Footnote 6

García-López et al. (2017) use Butler’s ideas of performativity and Antonio Gramsci’s ideas about counter-hegemony and common sense to analyze the movement and autogestion initiative from Casa Pueblo in the forests of Adjuntas, Puerto Rico. They argue that this initiative entails a process of changing dominant relations and common senses regarding democracy, forests, and community, and creating new “commons senses”: a praxis of democratic deliberation where “the people” decide, new economies that provide local livelihoods, the forest as a site of collective care and well-being to be managed communally for the common good, and new forms of community that build trans-local networks of solidarity.

Mingorría (2021) mobilizes Guitierrez’s concept of communitarian weavings, as well as Caffentzis, Federici, and De Angelis’ ideas on commoning, to analyze agrarian commons in the Maya-Q’eqchi’ communities in Guatemala. Such relations can be defined as having relative autonomy from capitalism, reproducing essential needs for “lives worth living. Mingorría identifies the communal relations around agriculture as a permanent form of agrarian commons, but also points to two types of “temporary commons” that intersect with those: “encuentros campesinos” (peasant gatherings), where participants enact daily collective practices; and “land occupations”. These show how commons are not fixed nor isolated, and supersede local community through weavings of communities in movement.

Scholars linked to the Barcelona School have also analyzed commoning processes within urban struggles against neoliberalization and for the right to the city (see also Sect. 19.3.2).

Finally, the Undisciplined Environment’s and FLOWs collaborative blog series on commoning water (Leonardelli et al., 2021)Footnote 7 has also collected a number of insights about the connections of commons-making with struggles against water privatization, for water justice and for self-management and direct democracy in water governance around the world (e.g., Bresnihan, 2020; Olivera & Archidiacono, 2021). Contributors have also mobilized ideas of multi-species commons, including human and more-than-human actors (salmon, beavers, algae, etc.) co-influencing each other (e.g., Woelfle-Erskine, 2020), and the making of commons through daily practices such as swimming (Hurst, 2020).

3.4 Commons and Degrowth

In the last decade, scholars from the School have been pushing for an alliance between the degrowth movement (i.e., from the Global North) and the environmental justice movement (from the rural South) to counterbalance the pervasiveness and continuous expansion of the industrial and neoliberal model of development (Martínez-Alier, 2012). As the editors of a recent SI on the topic argued, both movements are materialist and more-than-materialist, stress the contradictions between capitalist accumulation and social reproduction, promote justice and the reconfiguration of the economy, and complement each other’s deficits (a broader theoretical frame for environmental justice, and connections to wider social movements for degrowth) (Akbulut et al., 2019). Furthermore, many environmental justice movements represent degrowth claims in practice, even if those movements do not use the term degrowth.

The commons are also part of the above discourse. Rodríguez-Labajos et al. (2019) find important differences across the two movements in terms of values, ideology, strategies, and terminology, but also point to the commons as a way to connect both movements., Martínez-Alier (2020) shows how commons projects have become an important component of the environmental justice movement’s repertoire of contentions. Similarly, Velicu (2019) shows how degrowth can be also a source of inspiration for local communities that struggle to defend local natural resources through local democratic practices and alternative economies. In turn, commons is one of the core signifiers of the degrowth imaginary. Most of the grassroots initiatives that degrowthers highlight as alternative development pathways involve commoning processes centered on caring for human and non-human beings (D’Alisa et al., 2015b). As pointed by Helfrich and Bollier (2015), commons and degrowth complement each other and can together trump the growth and neoliberal imaginaries by illustrating ways of doing together and successfully combining well-being, justice, and environmental sustainability. This “social form” of the commons avoids growth compulsion through practices based on voluntariness, autonomy, and needs satisfaction (Euler, 2019).Footnote 8

For degrowthers, commons and commoning practices are pivotal to societies that prosper without growth. A degrowth‘s primary political strategy is to support commons-based initiatives and associated common senses (of ‘being together’), that change dominant culture and slowly debunk the growth hegemony (Kallis et al., 2020). However, some degrowth scholars emphasize that for such societal transformations to occur, commons cannot remain only small-scale initiatives beyond or against the state. Using a Gramscian approach to the state and Wright’s insights on theories of change, D’Alisa and Kallis (2020) criticize the lack of focus on commons on the transformation of state apparatuses. They maintain that the institutionalization of commons-based initiatives can enforce, spread, and promote further such initiatives, making possible revolutionary transformations that break with socially unfair and ecologically unsustainable capitalist forces (D’Alisa & Kallis, 2020). This is a contested vision in degrowth scholarship that diverges from the Narodnik tradition that Martínez-Alier and other environmental justice activists have followed. It is also probably an essential difference with commons movements activists and scholars, which emphasize the need for autonomy of commons (Euler & Gauditz, 2016) projects or the risks of being co-opted by the governments (e.g., Pera, 2020; Bianchi et al., 2022; see also Sect. 19.3.2).

4 Conclusion

In this chapter, we have aimed to highlight projects, authors, and contributions around the commons that can be associated with the Barcelona School. In that process, we have also aimed to give some suggestions for an emerging agenda for this burgeoning field of practice and reflection.

Contributions from the School offer a genuine mix of sensitivities and knowledges around the commons, but they all share an interest in their role as sustainability transformation actors. The commons can not only break through the status quo and “incrementalism” of policy (as social movements would do) but also prefigure, perform and scale up and out alternatives for more socially just, ecologically sustainable worlds. This understanding of the commons as both instances of self-governance and activism can be traced back to the institutional and environmental justice traditions and the works of Elinor Ostrom and Martínez-Alier in particular. They both saw in local communities’ environmental and justice concerns a genuine concern about social and ecological sustainability and the seeds of new ways of understanding governance and human-environmental interactions.

The four agenda threads highlighted here (commons movements, urban prosumer initiatives, performative commons, and commons & degrowth) are not independent of each other. As highlighted in Sect. 19.3, the urban commons literature has both built on and contributed to the commons movement agenda through accounts of the emergence of urban commons in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis; and the degrowth imaginary and its connections with the commons and movements finds in urban commons initiatives one of its main exponents of the way to go.

Although not explicitly discussed above, it is worth mentioning also the epistemologically eclectic, non-exclusionary approach reflected in the contributions reviewed here. They display a great deal of methodological diversity, ranging from the use of participatory action and case study research to meta-analyses and large-n statistical analyses. We believe this is not random and responds to a belief in the promise of mixed political ecology and (environmental) science methods (Zimmerer, 2015). Also, contributions have not only embraced the critical commons literature but also moved beyond and generated new theory in different degrees, ranging from typological work to new concepts and hypotheses. In the future, we envision a study of the commons that continues to deepen collaborations of multiple actors, to bridge disciplinary frontiers as well as between the divisions of researchers and practitioners.