Paper short abstract:

Communities worldwide are facing different but also similar challenges of commons grabbing or undermining the commons in neo-liberal/post-colonial contexts. This comparative paper examines local reactions, strategies and new bottom-up institution building against this 'undoing' in Africa and Europe.

Paper long abstract:

Comparative research in the last 15 years in Africa and Europe have indicated that many commoner's organizations struggle to either maintain their common property undermined since colonial times or struggle to keep the governance of the commons. This undoing process is in African context often related to not just land but commons grabbing as local communities lose not just their land but land related common-pool resources since colonial times. This undermines their resilience, especially of groups who need to be mobile or depend on seasonal resources. In Europe, more concrete in Switzerland, research has shown that while common property is secured, the transition to industrial society has lowered the market value of common-pool resources leaving few people with a high working load to maintain the commons and facing top-down state subsidy policies. In both contexts, especially states and experts do not recognize that local commoners have maintained and crafted biological diverse cultural landscapes via their common property institutions with rules and regulations to manage the common-pool resources on the land. Either governments and the private sector call for development via large-scale investments on the previous common lands or for conservation and green development for 'sustainable' food and energy production. Against these green commons grabbing processes several cases (for this paper examples from Sierra Leone, Kenya, Morocco and Switzerland) show that local people have developed new bottom-up rule building processes against the 'undoing' of the commons. This cases show conditions under which doing human mutualities is possible in a neo-liberal world.