State- and market-centric approaches to land redistribution have not worked in South Africa. Instead, South Africa has an agrarian structure marked by concentrated ownership in a shock-prone globalised food system. This chapter argues climate extremes and famines require a new approach to land redistribution and food systems thinking. Critical lessons can be learned about food provisioning from pre-capitalist South Africa’s commons mode of production, which exemplified the first attempts at food sovereignty. This is a decolonial imperative. Moreover, South Africa’s globalised industrial food system is premised on the destruction of nature and has engendered several ecological rifts, including famines and continued starvation faced by many. Campaigning for a food sovereignty commons system, through democratic systemic reform and as part of the deep and just transition, represents an alternative approach to re-agrarianise South Africa on a national and local scale in a heating world. In this regard, large-scale commercial farmers and the state face the challenge of thinking and behaving like commoners to ensure land, climate and more generally ecological justice.

This chapter brings together the main threads of the book, reflecting on the role of English marine protected areas and the extent to which they are sites for commoning or uncommoning and the extent to which they support the conservation of common-pool resources. It also offers broader critical observations on the way English marine protected areas law and regulation construct the relationship between nature and society.

This chapter introduces the multiple roles of marine protected areas using the language of the commons. After introducing how international biodiversity law uses commons' language, it attempts to discuss two main characterisations of marine protected areas: marine protected areas as regulatory tools for common-pool resources and marine protected area as institutional sites for supporting or hindering commoning practices. The discussion draws on three principal strands of social science literature: political ecology to show how rational and scientific interventions are always political, geographical literature to discuss the meaning of territory and uncover the more-than-human elements in the analysis of conservation intervention and most crucially, the literature on commons, which spans from the more traditional Ostromian analysis of common-pool resources to the more recent and politicised literature on commoning. Investigating the relationships between marine protected areas and commons is an essential preliminary step to enable a critical discussion of how English law and regulation conceptualises marine protected areas and contributes to the formation of marine protected areas as spaces of opening and/or closing.

The climate emergency is strengthening the understanding that humans, non-humans and the planet are intrinsically interconnected. International law has both participated in the creation of the paradigm that has led to these entangled socio-ecological problems and has proven to be inadequate for their remediation. This article argues that, through the multiple enclosure of natures, knowledges and times, international law imposes a vision of the world that is incompatible with the conception and functioning of the interconnected web of life. In light of this, we suggest that the political notion of commoning could offer useful intellectual opportunities for engagement with and a radical rethinking of international law as an element of ecological systems. By not treating natures, times and knowledges as objects of law, commoning opens an intellectual and confrontational space to rethink the premises, processes and aims of international law.

This chapter explores the various analytical traditions studying the commons, the different meanings each ascribes to this concept, and their implications for challenging and generating alternatives to dominant power relations, practices, institutions and common senses (ideas). I begin by discussing the institutional tradition of commons theory, and analyzes how they are governed through collective actions and rules (institutions). I then discuss the critique of this approach from political ecology, which situates commons in the political-economic context of capitalist development. I then identify four additional understandings of commons: as social relations and commons-making practices, as movements, as an alternative political-ecological paradigm, and as counter-hegemonic environmental politics.I conclude arguing that commons invite (re)thinking of key common senses in capitalist hegemony, such as private property and the concept of property itself, the developmentalist/extractivist, growth-based economy and its violent enclosures and dispossessions, democracy and “the state”, the separation of “nature” and “humans.,” and purely rational and individualistic subjectivities.

This chapter explores the borders of education in relation to contemporary refugee issues in Europe, specifically addressing the informal ‘Jungle’ camp in Calais, Northern France, where University of East London (UEL) colleagues taught an accredited Life Stories short course between September 2015 and October 2016. It suggests that this pedagogy apparently beyond the borders of the conventional university is in some ways precisely the terrain of the university and education more generally. It disassembles ‘education’ itself, in a context where it was at the same time a humanitarian response, a human right and a political field of reciprocity, traversed by processes of coalition, commoning and association. Within this field, the outside of the camp, more than the camp itself, might appear as a jungle, irrational and denying humanity, while the ‘Jungle’ space itself contested neoliberal education and counterposed its own ‘university’.