Commons and commoning

Many scholars of common-pool resource governance recognize that external actors play important roles in shaping the creation and outcomes of commons. But systematic attention to their influence has been infrequent. The growing body of research on commoning offers relevant theoretical tools for examining external influences on processes of emergence and institutional outcomes. Focusing on the commoning of Baja California Sur small-scale fisheries, our study leverages a comparative historical case study approach to examine the creation and reproduction of fishing cooperatives in two periods of postrevolutionary Mexico. We trace a multi-stranded process whereby public, private and community actors influenced the decisions and actions of resource users related to the emergence and long-term features of commons institutions. We find that state laws and policies, social movements and capitalist development of value-added fisheries were critical factors in the emergence of sustainable fishing cooperatives in the postrevolutionary 20th century Mexico. We find an absence of these factors in the emergence of fishing cooperatives since the 1990s under neoliberal changes to fisheries policy and the rise of environmentalism. Still, conservation-oriented researchers and NGOs have influenced development of more democratic processes and resource monitoring in some of these. We conclude by arguing for greater attention to the collective processes that affect the specific features of commoning–including external-local actor interactions– for deeper insights into the sustainability and durability of commons institutions.