Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses commoning in early sustainability debates, and uses a case study from Nepal about community forests and domestic biogas energy technology to consider the role of socio-ecological commons in emerging frameworks for sustainable multi-species livelihoods in the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

Commoning recognises collective rights of environmental use and access that anthropologists, geographers and historians have researched extensively. In early phases of the sustainability paradigm this positive evidence displaced the tragic inevitability of Hardin’s thought experiment; even if rational actor individualism and corporate group membership supported the dominant narrative (Ostrom) of how such systems operated. As new sustainability challenges of planetary boundaries are coming to the fore, the possibilities for commoning attract renewed attention. This paper explores pathways towards grassroots renewable energy transition, with discussion of research, conducted during COVID constraints, concerning the proliferation of domestic biogas systems in an example from southern Nepal. The biogas programme was promoted initially as a technology to wean villagers out of the habit of collecting firewood from what had been de facto forest commons, but in the post-civil war period, actors with radical agendas accelerated the expansion of biogas systems as a socially-inclusive energy transition technology for all villagers, dependant on access to community forest pasture lands. The paper critiques state-centric versions of commoning, by reviewing histories of dispossession at work in southern Nepal, and dominant accounts of community forestry. It looks forward to renewable and just energy transitions research that situates the role of socio-ecological commons within the context of normative shifts concerning what passes for sustainable at the level of domestic technology preferences ‘at the heat of the hearth’, and in relation to new prospects for sustainable livelihoods in the Anthropocene that reconfigure relations between people, multi-species, territories and things.