Socrates Schouten

Tag: Commons

  • Digital Social Innovation and the commons

    A new vocabulary of peer production and the commons emerges from the need to converge the work of a growing network of socially oriented organizations, companies, and individuals. In the new DSI4EU project, these movements are studied and supported through the lens of ‘digital social innovation’.

  • Practicing the Commons: conference days 4 and 5

    Practicing the Commons: conference days 4 and 5

    My third and last blog in this series covers days 4 and 5 of the 16th IASC conference, held from 10 to 14 July in Utrecht. Thursday was a day unlike the others, because it was a day of field trips with destinations all over the Netherlands, instead of a regular conference day. While I wasn’t…

  • Practicing the Commons: conference days 2 and 3

    Practicing the Commons: conference days 2 and 3

    My second blog in the series covers both day 2 and day 3 of the 16th IASC conference, because yesterday I could not find the time. The general theme I derive from the two days is: what can we use the ‘commons’ lens for? This is a major and indefinite topic of which I can…

  • Practicing the Commons: conference day 1

    Practicing the Commons: conference day 1

    Because of the abundance of ceremonies and niceties on the first day (see introductory post here) the attendees were to sit through only one block of parallel sessions. That does not prevent me from making this first day journal a long one. I attended the practitioners’ lab on communal land ownership, titled “What can customary…

  • Practicing the Commons: conference introduction

    Practicing the Commons: conference introduction

    This week I’m attending the 16th biennial conference ‘Practicing the Commons’ of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) I announced earlier. Quite a mouthful, and it’s something that needs explaining. That’s why I’ll be blogging about the conference today and throughout the week. It’s a conference of decent proportions: over 700…

  • Anticipating the global wave of collective action and citizens’ collectivities

    Between 10 and 14 July, academics and experts from the professional practice will be gathering in Utrecht at the ‘XVI Biennial IASC-Conference: Practising the Commons’. This will be the largest international commons meeting ever, with 570 presentations from 65 countries, given by academics, people from practice and policymakers. With a keynote address by Saskia Sassen,…

  • Brexit, a scene from the Anthropocene

    Slightly over two months ago, the ‘Brexit’ vote took place, leaving a lot of us in horror, lethargy, or at least confusion. If our confusion has receded as time has gone by, it is because we have become used to this new reality, not because it started making sense. Does it bring clarification when we…

  • New Page: The Commons

    The past decades have seen a gradual strengthening of economic thinking in the policy arena. Despite crises hitting society one after another, the portfolio of economic solutions used for societal problems has become bigger and bigger. This one-sided approach has come to the detriment of solutions that are based on the philosophy of care, or…

  • Resilience: the philosophy of socio-ecological leeway

    Environmental sciences are great fun for those who like to connect everything with everything else, and then cast their doubts on all these relations. But it also involves very urgent and earnest matter. For a university course, I wrote a 13p essay on agricultural paradigms and practices, which addresses how agriculture has been approached by…