Paper short abstract:

The paper is an inside story of a transdisciplinary engagement in the Sundarbans Delta, using interconnected archival, ethnography, and experimentation approaches – corroborating viable transitions through the re/commoning process – its challenges, opportunities, and the way forward.

Paper long abstract:

The story is anchored in a remote island village setting in the most vulnerable block of the Indian Sundarbans, Gosaba – surrounded by three rivers, shaped by constant saline and fresh water interactions, facing the Bay of Bengal, and sustaining as a ‘riskscape’, conveying the meta narrative of spatio-temporal production of socio-ecological risks and place-based survival mechanisms in repetitive cycles. The initiative is inland fishing experimentation in the cooperative canals of Kumirmari to actuate cooperativizing ideals and essence curtailing exclusionary tendencies and trajectories. These canals have a contemporary history of management and governance by local village temples or para (neighbourhood) clubs, demonstrating power choreographies of control by political cadres, panchayats, and locally influential villagers. While social hierarchies have been impediments in upsetting the commons agenda of including and allocating resource distribution to the most marginalized, the need to complement community fishing knowledge with mainstream scientific and technical expertise in a dynamic-volatile ecogeomorphology was an imperative to accelerate productivity. The transdisiciplinary experiment, optimizing on global funding opportunities, and connecting multiple stakeholders on spontaneously evolving principles of knowledge coproduction, mobilization, and actions is transformative in transitioning to viability through the re/commoning process and a SWOT analysis at every stage to ensure upscale possibilities in the delta and beyond. The paper will also discuss how an A2E (archival-ethnography-experimentation) approach has been followed to historically contextualize challenges and opportunities of this re/commoning endeavour within the larger debates and discourses of the ‘tragedy of commons’ in the Sundarbans.