Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper develops an ethics of failed care to examine pastoral multispecies commoning in Inner Mongolia. Through sheep deaths and veterinary responses, it shows how shared life is sustained and repaired amid ecological uncertainty and market-state pressures.

Paper long abstract

This paper introduces the concept of an ethics of failed care as a lens for examining how multispecies commoning is sustained, contested, and reconfigured when care does not achieve its intended outcomes. Based on long-term ethnographic research with herding households and local veterinarians in a pastoral community in Inner Mongolia (2021–2022), it explores two episodes involving the deaths of sheep within the same herd: a ewe that died during prolonged labor and another sheep dissected after a diagnosis of parasitic infection associated with “dead” water.

Rather than treating failure as the end of care, the paper argues that breakdowns in more-than-human relations become ethical ruptures through which responsibility, reciprocity, and shared life are renegotiated. Practices such as burial, refusal of payment, diagnostic dissection, and shared consumption operate as forms of stewardship that redirect care toward what remains possible. These responses reveal how multispecies commoning is enacted not through stable harmony but through moments of loss, reflection, and repair.

Situating these events within constrained pastoral ecologies shaped by limited mobility, intensifying market demands, and tightening governance, the paper highlights how everyday efforts to sustain shared life unfold amid contested environments. Failed care thus becomes a generative ethical node, illuminating how herders and veterinarians strive to live well with their animals under conditions where multispecies futures are increasingly uncertain. In doing so, the paper extends multispecies and care scholarship beyond ideals of “good care” to attend to rupture, redistribution, and the ongoing labor of commoning.