Commons Regimes at the Crossroads: Environmental Justice Movements and Commoning

In this chapter, we offer an overview of the scholarship at the interface of commons regimes and social movements and unveil the agenda of the Barcelona School around this topic. The frontiers of theory and research on the governance of commons have notably evolved in the last decade. At the forefront of such evolution is the study of environmental conflicts around the use and management of common resources. Social movements are one means through which such conflicts manifest in relation to the discourse and practice of commons governance. As we claim here, key in this evolution has been the contributions of Joan Martínez Alier and others around the environmentalism of the poor, environmental justice movements, and alternatives to “growth”. Important research programs within the new scholarship, and scholars within the School in particular (See Sect. 19.3 where we identify the initiatives and scholars associated to this), include the study of interactions between mobilization and community-based natural resource management regimes in rural contexts; the emergence and consolidation of new urban commons; the study of processes of commoning and becoming a commoner; and the connections between commons and the degrowth scholarship