The collective and communal nature of common pool resources mark them out as distinct from resources that may be owned privately or controlled by governments. Commons are spaces where intervention necessarily involves engaging with collective expressions of power within communities enabling marginalized and vulnerable groups to negotiate with authority and power in local contexts. At the present time, apart from leveraging the existing channels and institutions, these negotiations can also take the form of struggles, movements, and everyday acts of resistance. Alongside community-driven initiatives involving direct stakeholders, such efforts can also involve a wider set of actors such as civil society organizations, activists, citizen groups.
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Differences Within Communities
Communities are invariably heterogeneous and various factors such as caste, class, gender, religion, etc. constitute internal power hierarchies. These power structures manifest in the way commons are accessed, utilized and managed. The politics of commons is thus the politics of perceptions as well as the politics of power relations within communities. It is difficult to understand the way commons are perceived without understanding these complex power structures. As a result, power is often scattered as opposed to a very clear hierarchy. Identifying how the power is expressed through practices, rules and norms on ground would be useful to understand the implications on common pool resources.
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Social Movements
Commons have historically been contested spaces, not only due to internal tensions within communities but also and as importantly due to the involvement/interest of actors outside of communities managing them. Of these, State and market are the two entities that threaten the status of commons as community owned spaces in a critical way. The interactions of these different entities and the tensions that are produced influence how commons are perceived and used and are the roots out of which acts of resistance and social movements grow. Violence is frequently embedded in the way power plays out on ground, denying rights to access and use resources and is responded to by coming together of less-powerful and marginalized groups facing the brunt of the conflict. Such solidarity and resistance can be witnessed in the different social movements that have taken place throughout the history of commons.
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