COMMONPATHS - Commonification: transition pathways for urban sustainability

The growing pace of resource consumption and inequalities in urban areas in the Global North and the Global South poses urgent socio-ecological problems of sustainability. With growing worldwide urbanization, a drastic reduction of resource consumption is necessary to achieve a more just future for all human beings within the planetary boundaries. COMMONPATHS considers how urban commons institutions (UCI) contribute to confronting these challenges in Ghana and Switzerland. UCIs are defined as innovative forms of self-organization among urban resource users which (a) generate collective institutional arrangements supporting shared ownership, shared decision-making, and shared responsibilities, and (b) promote social practices leading to a sense of community (e.g. belonging, engagement, identity), as prerequisites for (c) decommodifying human-nature interactions.Significance. In line with new institutionalism, COMMONPATHS considers sustainability challenges to be institutional issues: the rules of the game emerging in UCIs can potentially provide long-term solutions to sustainable resource management beyond the dichotomy of the state and the market. COMMONPATHS goes one step further and claims that UCIs may even be forms of social-economic organizations that (1) can make transformations toward a postgrowth organization of society socially, ecologically, and economically acceptable, and (2) counteract or reinforce important megatrends impacting urban sustainability. The overarching questions are: how do commonification processes influence urban sustainability by providing new solutions beyond market and state inabilities? Which transition pathways lead to their (un)successful development? And what is their transformative potential as well as limitations?Main goals. COMMONPATHS aims to better understand the emergence, organization, effects, and conditions of success of 3 trends of commonification aimed at (1) greening cities, (2) creating affordable housing and (3) supporting community agri-food initiatives. Focusing on the governance of these 3 resource systems, COMMONPATHS aims to analyse the conditions under which these movements effectively contribute to strong urban sustainability. COMMONPATHS opts for a strong definition of sustainability, which recognizes the potential contradictions between endless economic growth and planetary boundaries.This interdisciplinary analysis will first result in new design principles of sustainable commonification of resource governance in urban settings. Design principles are those features of institutions and resource systems that are associated with strong sustainability. Second, COMMONPATHS will develop a typology of transition pathways toward commonification and interrogate the political-economic dimension of urban commonification. Third, if UCIs are able to create “islands of decommodification” in urban landscapes otherwise dominated by profit seeking behaviours, their study will provide an empirically-grounded contribution to debates on postgrowth organisation of societies.Research approach & implementation. Achieving these ambitious objectives requires an inter- and transdisciplinary approach. We build on the tight collaboration of complementary disciplines: (1) urban geography and institutional analysis, (2) individual behavioural perspectives and transition studies, (3) political ecology and intersectionality and (4) urban ecology. These disciplinary approaches span natural and social sciences, qualitative and quantitative research, individual- and social-focused interpretations, and empirical and theoretical approaches. COMMONPATHS is divided into three main phases. The first one will provide an overview of commonification initiatives aimed at greening cities, creating affordable housing, and providing community-led sustainable food. In a second phase we will perform indepth case studies in Ghana and Switzerland which will provide detailed information on causal relationships between variables and identify key variables, mechanisms, and outcomes. A third phase will use pathbreaking archetype methodology to identify patterns out of the initiatives investigated in phase 1, generate design principles of sustainable commonification, and evaluate generalization (upscaling) potential. Conditions for an urban postgrowth society will be explored in dedicated transdisciplinary workshops, as well as contributions to counteract/reinforce 4 megatrends impacting urban sustainability. (Quelle: https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/209446)