Taught By:
Arun Agrawal
Samuel Trask Dana Professor
Sustainability and Development
Food Systems | Conservation + Restoration
School of Environment and Sustainability
University of Michigan
Course Description:
In this course, we will learn about social action, commoning, and change. Every individual, every collective, every organization has the potential to bring about extraordinary change. The question is how change happens, how to make it happen, and the role of social action in change. There are many pathways to change. Commoning, and related to it social action, are two such pathways. Their role in transformations of our current unsustainable trajectories is central. Transformative change is fundamental, multi-system shift in how people and collectives think and act. It emerges from the work of many agents, distributed and aligned, across different sectors, scales, and levels in a society. Widespread social action efforts, in the aggregate, bring about social change. By themselves, individuals and organizations can contribute to such change. Social action is people working together to bring about change in society, policies, governance, institutions, and rules. Commoning is collective effort based on reciprocity to achieve joint purpose. At one level, the two concepts of commoning and social action are closely related. But each has a distinct element as well: Social action highlights action by groups for change; commoning highlights reciprocity and purpose in joint action.