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Presentation short abstract

This paper asks how herbivores make and unsettle commons, shaping contested visions of care, governance, and multispecies coexistence. Beginning with the New Forest (UK) and the pony, it explores how grazing traditions endure, adapt, or fray amid tourism pressures and shifting rural imaginaries.

Presentation long abstract

Herbivores increasingly sit at the centre of debates about how European biocultural landscapes are made, governed, and imagined. In the New Forest National Park (UK), free-roaming ponies occupy an ambiguous position. They appear as heritage symbols, ecological labourers, tourist attractions, and sources of friction, unsettling boundaries between care and control, wildness and domestication, value and nuisance. This paper asks how herbivores participate in the making and unmaking of commons, and how their movements, behaviours, and shifting social legibility shape contested norms of access, responsibility, and shared stewardship.

Drawing on political ecology, commons scholarship, and multispecies studies, the paper approaches commoning as a relational, affective, and more-than-human rather than a solely institutional arrangement. Focusing on the New Forest as an enduring pastoral common where ponies, commoners, visitors, and institutions continually negotiate their shared landscape, it explores how grazing traditions endure, adapt, or fray amid intensifying tourism pressures and shifting cultural imaginaries. It further examines the embodied ways ponies are sensed (seen, mis-seen, or overlooked) through everyday encounters that render their bodies alternately visible, spectacular, or invisible within the landscape, shaping how herbivores become knowable and governable.

This paper develops conceptual questions about how herbivores reconfigure governance regimes, enact forms of ecological labour, and generate frictions that complicate assumptions about stability, heritage, and stewardship. It asks how commons shift when herbivores are treated as co-participants in governance and care, rather than passive objects of management or instruments of conservation.