Where is the 21st IASC Biennial Conference being held?

The conference is being held in Makassar, IDN.

What is the primary focus of this conference?

The conference focuses on the theme of commons in a transforming world, addressing challenges and opportunities in managing shared resources.

21st IASC Biennial Conference

Name: 21st IASC Biennial Conference
Start: 2027-06-21T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-06-25T00:00:00Z
Location: Makassar

Jun 21–25, 2027Makassar, IndonesiaIn-person

Registration open

The 21st IASC Biennial Conference, hosted in Makassar, IDN, focuses on the critical theme of commons in a world undergoing significant transformation. This event convenes experts, practitioners, and policymakers to explore the multifaceted challenges and opportunities associated with managing shared resources in an era of rapid change. Participants will engage in discussions ranging from environmental governance to social equity, all within the context of common pool resource management.

Committees & topics

Topics
Centering the Commons: Resilience, Resistance, and Collective Action · Forests, Livelihoods, and Tenure · The Fluid Commons: Marine, Coastal, Island, and Freshwater · Global Urban Commons and Kampung Commoning · Food as a Commons · Indigeneity and Decolonization in and of the Commons · Democracy and the Commons: State, Civil Society, and Communities · Commons at Risk: Climate Change, Disasters, and Pathways to Resilience

Why it matters

The management of common pool resources is a foundational aspect of sustainable development and global stability. As populations grow and environmental pressures intensify, effective strategies for governing shared resources become increasingly vital. This conference provides a crucial platform for advancing research and practical solutions in this field, especially as it brings together diverse perspectives from around the globe.

The discussions at this event are particularly relevant given the increasing frequency of climate-related events and the growing recognition of indigenous and local communities' roles in resource stewardship. Understanding how different societies, from the Amazon basin to the Pacific islands, approach the commons can inform more resilient and equitable governance models. The insights generated here can directly influence policy-making and community-level initiatives aimed at fostering sustainable resource use and mitigating conflicts over shared assets.

How to prepare

Delegates preparing for this conference should focus on understanding the diverse theoretical frameworks and practical case studies related to common pool resource management. Familiarity with concepts such as 'tragedy of the commons' and its critiques, as well as alternative governance models, will be beneficial. Reviewing literature on collective action, institutional design, and the role of local knowledge in resource management will provide a strong foundation for engagement.

Consider how different cultural and political contexts influence the perception and management of commons. For instance, the approaches taken in BRA or IND might differ significantly from those in NOR or NZL due to varying historical, legal, and social structures. Preparing to engage with these diverse perspectives will enhance the learning experience and contribute to more robust discussions. Additionally, exploring the intersection of technology and commons management, including digital commons and data governance, could offer novel angles for contribution.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Indonesia

As the host nation, IDN will likely emphasize its unique experiences with marine and forest commons, particularly regarding indigenous rights and sustainable livelihoods.

Role in topic

IDN, with its vast archipelago and rich biodiversity, faces significant challenges and opportunities in managing marine and forest common pool resources. Its perspective will highlight the importance of local community involvement and traditional ecological knowledge in sustainable resource governance.

Brazil

BRA will likely focus on the Amazon rainforest as a global common, emphasizing the complexities of conservation, resource extraction, and indigenous land rights.

Role in topic

BRA's perspective is crucial due to the Amazon rainforest, a critical global common. Discussions will likely revolve around deforestation, biodiversity loss, and the rights of indigenous communities in managing these vital resources.

India

IND will probably bring insights from its experience with managing diverse agricultural and water commons, highlighting issues of equitable access and governance in densely populated regions.

Role in topic

IND offers a perspective shaped by its vast population and reliance on agricultural and water commons. Its contributions will likely focus on the challenges of ensuring equitable access, managing scarcity, and implementing effective governance mechanisms for shared resources.

Kenya

KEN will likely contribute perspectives on pastoralist commons, wildlife conservation, and the impacts of climate change on shared rangelands and water sources.

Role in topic

KEN's experience with pastoralist communities and wildlife conservation areas provides a unique perspective on managing rangelands and water sources as commons. The country's insights will be valuable in discussions on climate change adaptation and community-based conservation.

Fiji

FJI will likely highlight the vulnerabilities of small island developing states to climate change impacts on marine commons and traditional fishing grounds.

Role in topic

As a small island developing state, FJI will offer a critical perspective on the impacts of climate change on marine commons, including coral reefs and traditional fishing grounds. Its input will underscore the urgency of international cooperation for climate resilience and ocean governance.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Centering the Commons: Resilience, Resistance, and Collective Action

The study of the commons emerged as a formal field in response to Garrett Hardin's 1968 'Tragedy of the Commons' thesis, which argued that shared resources were inevitably overexploited. Elinor Ostrom's empirical work, culminating in her 1990 'Governing the Commons' and 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, fundamentally challenged that view by documenting communities worldwide that have sustainably managed forests, fisheries, irrigation systems, and pastures for generations under self-organized rules. Her eight design principles became the analytical backbone of commons scholarship and animated the founding of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) in 1989. In the decades since, enclosure pressures have intensified: land grabs, privatization of water and seed, digital platform monopolies, and extractive concessions on Indigenous and community lands have displaced commoners and weakened customary tenure. At the same time, movements from La Via Campesina to urban housing cooperatives and open-source software communities have reframed the commons as a site of active resistance and prefigurative politics, not merely a resource-management regime. Today the debate centers on how collective action can scale to confront polycrises—climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, inequality, and democratic erosion—without being co-opted by states or markets. Recognition instruments such as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (2018), the FAO Voluntary Guidelines on Tenure (VGGT), and emerging jurisprudence on community rights provide partial scaffolding, but enforcement remains weak and contested.

Key players

Forests, Livelihoods, and Tenure

Roughly 1.6 billion people depend on forests for livelihoods, and Indigenous Peoples and local communities customarily hold or manage at least half of the world's land, yet legally recognized community tenure covers only a fraction of that area. Colonial-era forest codes that nationalized woodlands persist in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, criminalizing customary use and concentrating control in forestry departments or concession holders. Reform movements gained traction with Nepal's community forestry program (from the late 1970s), Mexico's ejido forests, Brazil's extractive reserves, and India's Forest Rights Act of 2006. Global frameworks—REDD+ under the UNFCCC, the New York Declaration on Forests, the Glasgow Leaders' Declaration on Forests and Land Use (2021), and the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR, 2023)—have channeled finance and market pressure toward forest protection. But these mechanisms often bypass tenure questions, sometimes intensifying 'green grabs' as carbon projects and conservation concessions overlap with community lands without free, prior, and informed consent. The current frontier is securing community tenure as the foundation for both livelihoods and climate outcomes: evidence from the Rights and Resources Initiative and World Resources Institute shows community-managed forests typically have lower deforestation rates than strictly protected areas. Disputes persist over carbon rights, benefit-sharing, criminalization of forest defenders, and the role of certification schemes.

Key players

The Fluid Commons: Marine, Coastal, Island, and Freshwater

Water-based commons span from village irrigation tanks and lagoon fisheries to transboundary rivers and the high seas. UNCLOS (1982) established the framework for territorial seas, exclusive economic zones, and the Area beyond national jurisdiction, while the 2023 BBNJ Agreement ('High Seas Treaty') opened the legal door to marine protected areas and benefit-sharing for marine genetic resources in ABNJ. Coastal small-scale fisheries, recognized in the FAO SSF Guidelines (2014), support the majority of global fishers but face displacement from industrial fleets, aquaculture expansion, blue-economy zoning, and coastal tourism. Freshwater commons are under acute stress: over 260 transboundary river basins are governed by uneven treaty regimes, and groundwater—often an invisible commons—is being depleted from the Indo-Gangetic plain to the Ogallala. Small Island Developing States face existential threats from sea-level rise that complicate maritime baselines and statehood itself, prompting the Pacific Islands Forum's 2021 Declaration on Preserving Maritime Zones. Current debates pivot on reconciling area-based conservation targets (the Kunming-Montreal '30x30' goal) with customary tenure, regulating deep-sea mining under the International Seabed Authority, curbing illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, and operationalizing loss and damage for coastal and island commoners.

Key players

Global Urban Commons and Kampung Commoning

More than half the world's population now lives in cities, and urbanization has produced new forms of enclosure—financialized housing, privatized public space, platform-mediated mobility—as well as new commoning practices. The urban commons literature, building on David Harvey, Massimo De Angelis, and Sheila Foster, treats neighborhoods, streets, data, and infrastructure as resources whose governance can be reclaimed through collective practice. Bologna's Regulation on the Urban Commons (2014) and Barcelona's citizen-platform municipalism have become reference points, alongside community land trusts from New York to Nairobi. In Southeast Asia, the kampung—dense, mixed-use urban villages in Indonesia and neighboring countries—exemplifies bottom-up commoning: shared courtyards, mutual-aid (gotong royong) labor, and informal tenure arrangements that produce affordability and social resilience without formal property regimes. Yet kampungs face repeated waves of eviction for redevelopment, infrastructure, and 'world-class city' branding, as seen in Jakarta's Kampung Akuarium struggle and contested megaprojects. Global frameworks—the New Urban Agenda (Habitat III, 2016) and SDG 11—endorse inclusive urbanization but offer weak protection against displacement. Live debates concern the right to the city, community-led upgrading versus slum clearance, data and digital commons in 'smart city' deployments, and how municipal governments can institutionalize commons partnerships.

Key players

Food as a Commons

The dominant 20th-century framing treated food as a private commodity, organized through Green Revolution productivism, intellectual property over seeds (UPOV 1991, TRIPS), and globalized agribusiness supply chains. This model raised aggregate output but concentrated corporate power, eroded agrobiodiversity, and left roughly 700-800 million people chronically undernourished, according to FAO's State of Food Security and Nutrition reports. In response, food-sovereignty movements—anchored by La Via Campesina since 1996—reframed food as a commons: a shared good produced through peasant labor, agroecology, seed sharing, and local markets. Key instruments now bracket the debate. The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA, 2001) created a multilateral system for crop genetic resources; the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP, 2018) affirmed rights to seeds, land, and biodiversity; and the CFS Voluntary Guidelines on Food Systems and Nutrition (2021) emphasize agroecological transitions. Yet patent regimes on seeds and gene-edited varieties, consolidation among input firms, and ultra-processed food expansion continue to push the system away from a commons logic. Current contests involve digital sequence information (DSI) and benefit-sharing under the CBD, the future of farmer-managed seed systems, school feeding and public procurement as commons-strengthening policy, and how climate adaptation finance treats smallholder and Indigenous food systems.

Key players

Indigeneity and Decolonization in and of the Commons

Indigenous Peoples number an estimated 476 million across more than 90 countries and steward lands containing roughly 80% of remaining terrestrial biodiversity. Colonial enclosure—through doctrines of discovery, terra nullius, and forced assimilation—systematically dispossessed Indigenous commons, recasting them as 'unused' state or private property. The post-1970s Indigenous rights movement produced ILO Convention 169 (1989), the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2007), and growing recognition of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC). Decolonizing the commons goes beyond legal recognition. It questions whose epistemologies define 'resources,' 'governance,' and even 'the commons' itself—a term whose European genealogy (English open fields, Roman res communis) does not map neatly onto Indigenous relational ontologies of land, water, and kin. Scholars and movements increasingly distinguish Indigenous lifeways from Ostromian common-pool resource frameworks, while still finding productive dialogue between them. Initiatives like New Zealand's legal personhood for the Whanganui River, Bolivia and Ecuador's rights-of-nature provisions, and Canada's Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas reflect attempts at structural pluralism. Key tensions today include carbon and biodiversity markets operating on Indigenous lands without consent, the criminalization and assassination of Indigenous land defenders (documented annually by Global Witness), the unfinished business of repatriation and reparations, and debates over whether 'commons' is itself a colonizing category requiring careful translation.

Key players

Democracy and the Commons: State, Civil Society, and Communities

Commons governance is inseparable from broader questions of democratic legitimacy. Ostrom's principles—clear boundaries, congruent rules, collective-choice arenas, graduated sanctions, nested enterprises—describe a polycentric democracy at resource level. But commons sit within larger political systems, and the past decade has seen democratic backsliding (V-Dem, Freedom House) coincide with shrinking civic space for the very civil-society actors that defend community resources. CIVICUS reports that the majority of the world's population now lives under 'repressed' or 'obstructed' civic conditions. States relate to commons in contradictory ways: as enabling legislators (community forestry acts, cooperative laws, participatory budgeting), as enclosers (concessions, expropriation, securitization), and as competitors (state-owned enterprises in resource sectors). Civil-society federations, social movements, and cooperatives mediate this terrain, while populist and authoritarian governments increasingly delegitimize NGOs as 'foreign agents.' Meanwhile, deliberative innovations—citizens' assemblies on climate in France, Ireland, and elsewhere—offer commons-compatible democratic forms at larger scales. Current debates center on how to institutionalize co-management and subsidiarity without either capture by the state or fragmentation into clientelism; how to protect human rights defenders, particularly environmental defenders; and how digital public infrastructure and platform regulation can be governed as democratic commons rather than corporate or state monopolies.

Key players

Commons at Risk: Climate Change, Disasters, and Pathways to Resilience

Climate change is both a commons problem—the atmosphere as the archetypal global commons—and a force that destabilizes local commons everywhere. The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (2021-2023) documents accelerating impacts on fisheries, forests, rangelands, and freshwater systems, while IPBES underscores the entanglement of climate and biodiversity collapse. Disaster losses, tracked by UNDRR and the Sendai Framework (2015-2030), fall disproportionately on commons-dependent communities: small-scale fishers, pastoralists, smallholders, and informal urban residents. The UNFCCC architecture—Paris Agreement (2015), the Glasgow-Sharm el-Sheikh work programme on mitigation, the Global Stocktake (2023), and the Loss and Damage Fund operationalized at COP28—provides increasing recognition but inadequate finance, with the New Collective Quantified Goal agreed at COP29 widely criticized as insufficient. Adaptation finance remains a small share of climate flows, and only a fraction reaches the local level. Carbon markets under Article 6 raise persistent concerns about additionality, permanence, and rights violations on Indigenous and community lands. Resilience pathways increasingly emphasize community-based adaptation, ecosystem-based approaches, and the protective role of secure tenure and strong collective institutions. Evidence from Ostromian scholarship and disaster studies (e.g., Daniel Aldrich on social capital) shows that communities with denser commons institutions recover faster. The open questions are how to channel climate and disaster finance directly to commoners, how to recognize non-economic losses, and how to prevent maladaptive responses—seawalls, plantations, relocations—from enclosing the very commons they purport to protect.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for 21st IASC Biennial Conference.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Europe's June Heatwave: Infrastructure Crisis

Frederick Douglass Bridge Protest Disrupts DC

Supreme Court's Caste Reservation Rulings

Muslim Quota Demand Fuels Lok Sabha Debate

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Dynamic Analysis

Engagement Strategies

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

Indonesia June 2027

By committee

Frequently asked questions

21st IASC Biennial Conference

Jun 21–25, 2027Makassar, IndonesiaIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Centering the Commons: Resilience, Resistance, and Collective Action · Forests, Livelihoods, and Tenure · The Fluid Commons: Marine, Coastal, Island, and Freshwater · Global Urban Commons and Kampung Commoning · Food as a Commons · Indigeneity and Decolonization in and of the Commons · Democracy and the Commons: State, Civil Society, and Communities · Commons at Risk: Climate Change, Disasters, and Pathways to Resilience

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Indonesia

As the host nation, IDN will likely emphasize its unique experiences with marine and forest commons, particularly regarding indigenous rights and sustainable livelihoods.

Role in topic

Brazil

BRA will likely focus on the Amazon rainforest as a global common, emphasizing the complexities of conservation, resource extraction, and indigenous land rights.

Role in topic

India

IND will probably bring insights from its experience with managing diverse agricultural and water commons, highlighting issues of equitable access and governance in densely populated regions.

Role in topic

Kenya

KEN will likely contribute perspectives on pastoralist commons, wildlife conservation, and the impacts of climate change on shared rangelands and water sources.

Role in topic

Fiji

FJI will likely highlight the vulnerabilities of small island developing states to climate change impacts on marine commons and traditional fishing grounds.

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Centering the Commons: Resilience, Resistance, and Collective Action

Key players

Forests, Livelihoods, and Tenure

Key players

The Fluid Commons: Marine, Coastal, Island, and Freshwater

Key players

Global Urban Commons and Kampung Commoning

Key players

Food as a Commons

Key players

Indigeneity and Decolonization in and of the Commons

Key players

Democracy and the Commons: State, Civil Society, and Communities

Key players

Commons at Risk: Climate Change, Disasters, and Pathways to Resilience

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for 21st IASC Biennial Conference.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Europe's June Heatwave: Infrastructure Crisis

Frederick Douglass Bridge Protest Disrupts DC

Supreme Court's Caste Reservation Rulings

Muslim Quota Demand Fuels Lok Sabha Debate

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Dynamic Analysis

Engagement Strategies

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

Indonesia June 2027

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

The 4th Journal of Central Banking Law and Institutions International Conference (JCLI2026)

6th International Conference on Governance, Public Administration, and Social Science (ICoGPASS 2026)

ISRM Indonesia Conference 2026

FPCI Public Discussion: Mid-Year Geopolitical and Economic Outlook 2026

IFAR Consortium Annual Conference 2026

Young Public Diplomacy Summit 2026 Indonesia

Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

The 4th Journal of Central Banking Law and Institutions International Conference (JCLI2026)

6th International Conference on Governance, Public Administration, and Social Science (ICoGPASS 2026)

ISRM Indonesia Conference 2026

FPCI Public Discussion: Mid-Year Geopolitical and Economic Outlook 2026

IFAR Consortium Annual Conference 2026

Young Public Diplomacy Summit 2026 Indonesia

Frequently asked questions