In Common

Point Reyes National Seashore sits on a foggy peninsula about an hour north of San Francisco. It is a place of trails, wildlife, and dramatic coastal scenery. What many visitors don't expect to find there are dairy farms. And yet for well over a century, family ranches have been part of this landscape, some operated by the same families for five or six generations. That coexistence has been at the heart of one of the most contentious disputes in the history of the American national park system.

In January 2025, after years of litigation and closed-door negotiation, a settlement was reached: most of the ranching operations at Point Reyes would close, and the families that ran them would leave. As of April 2026, twelve ranches have departed and two remain.

Depending on who you ask, this is either a long-overdue victory for wildlife and ecological restoration, or the deeply unjust displacement of a community that had been told for decades it had a future in the park. The tule elk are free to roam. The ranchers are mostly gone. The debate about what it all means is very much ongoing.

In this episode, historian Laura Alice Watt, author of The Paradox of Preservation, traces the arc of this conflict from the park's founding through the Drakes Bay Oyster Company controversy and into the battle over the ranches. Her book offers a window into how the National Park Service and the Nation Parks in the United States work, and what the story of Point Reyes reveals about the contradictions of American conservation.

In this episode, the second in our series previewing the themes of the upcoming IASC conference, Michael sits down with the co-leaders of the Forests, Livelihoods, and Tenure sub-theme ahead of the conference in Makassar, South Sulawesi, Indonesia next summer. His guests are Moira Moeliono, a forest and climate researcher with more than twenty years at what is now the Landscape Alliance; Sandeep Khandekar, a commons practitioner based in India with Living Landscapes; and Jude Kimengsi, who leads the Landscape Governance and Development research group at Göttingen University.

The conversation covers why forests, livelihoods, and tenure belong together as a theme. The guests discuss the unresolved tensions around carbon regimes and REDD+, asking whether programs like these ultimately serve forest-dependent communities or replicate the exclusions of earlier extractive regimes. They explore the colonial roots of state forest ownership in Indonesia and Cameroon, the limited reach of social forestry reforms, and the informal and often invisible forms of power that shape who actually benefits from forest governance.

The subtheme is actively seeking submissions across multiple categories: academic papers, practitioner-academic dialogues, and policy roundtables. Topics of particular interest include innovative benefit-sharing mechanisms for forest communities, the role of technology in tenure mapping and rights claims, and research that surfaces the informal rules and hidden interests shaping forest governance. The call for submissions is now open: visit the conference website for details: https://2027.iasc-commons.org/

Scholars publish more papers every year, but does that output actually add up to knowledge? In this episode, Michael sat down with three scholars who have been asking exactly that question within the field of environmental governance.

The guests are editors and contributors behind a special issue of Environmental Policy and Governance (Fall 2025), dedicated to the problem of scientific cumulation: whether research in this field is building on itself, or simply accumulating.

Guests

Michael Rose — Senior Researcher, Leuphana University

Jens Newig — Professor, Leuphana University

Sina Leipold — Professor, Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research

In this episode
Michael Rose and Jens discuss their own contribution to the special issue, "How to Assess Knowledge Cumulation in Environmental Governance Research? Conceptual and Empirical Explorations," which analyzes the Earth Systems Governance (ESG) research community. Their findings are sobering: ESG research shows limited potential for knowledge cumulation, marked by a fragmented journal landscape, core-periphery citation structures, heterogeneous research questions, and few shared reference works, concepts, or frameworks.

The conversation also ranges across the special issue as a whole, which tackles the cumulation problem from several angles:

Bibliometric analysis mapping how key concepts like "environmental governance process" are used inconsistently across research communities

Methodology, including whether archetype analysis in social-ecological systems research can serve as a genuine building block for theory

Why researchers chase novelty and what that costs the field

Forest carbon offsetting in Uganda as a case study showing how even a small, focused body of literature can fail to accumulate when papers rest on incompatible theoretical assumptions

Epistemological diversity, indigenous and local knowledge, and the role science-policy interfaces play in translating knowledge into practice in climate and biodiversity governance

Link to special issue:

Special issue: Knowledge Cumulation in Environmental Governance, Environmental Policy and Governance, Fall 2025

In this episode, Michael interviews organizers of the upcoming IASC 2027 conference: Yanti Kusumanto, Nurhady Sirimorok, and Micah Fisher. Together they discuss the conference's theme, sub-themes, and the significance of hosting it in Makassar, South Sulawesi, Indonesia, a region with deep relevance to commons governance.

 

The conference website is live! For more information, go to https://2027.iasc-commons.org/

This is the first in a new series of episodes exploring each of the conference's subthemes, so stay tuned for more!

In this episode, Michael speaks with Thomas Falk, a researcher at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Thomas works at the intersection of research and development, and for many years he has been designing and testing what he calls experiential learning games: structured, face-to-face exercises that help communities understand and address their shared resource challenges. Thomas employs games in the service of a key principle: that the best way to help communities manage their shared resources isn't to tell them what to do, but to create a space where they can figure it out for themselves. And that space, it turns out, can look a lot like a game.

In this conversation, Thomas discuss an important principle shared by many commons scholars: that communities are often better at identifying the right institutions for their own contexts than outside researchers are. The games he designs don't hand communities a solution. Instead, they help participants see the structure of their own collective problems clearly, often for the first time, and then work out the rules they want to live by together.

Michael and Thomas discuss how such games are run, the role of gender in collective decision-making, what it actually looks like to facilitate one of these sessions in a village in rural India, and what the evidence actually shows about whether any of this changes behavior in the real world.

Thomas would like to acknowledge the financial support for his work from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the CGIAR Policy Innovations Science Program, the CGIAR Gender Equality and Inclusion Accelerator, and the Co-Impact Philanthropic Funds.


References:

Falk, Thomas, Wei Zhang, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Lara Bartels, Richu Sanil, Pratiti Priyadarshini, and Ilkhom Soliev. 2023. “Games for Experiential Learning: Triggering Collective Changes in Commons Management.” Ecology and Society: A Journal of Integrative Science for Resilience and Sustainability 28 (1). https://doi.org/10.5751/es-13862-280130.

Janssen, Marco A., Thomas Falk, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, and Björn Vollan. 2023. “Using Games for Social Learning to Promote Self-Governance.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 62 (101289): 101289. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2023.101289.

Steimanis, Ivo, Thomas Falk, Lara Bartels, Vishwambhar Duche, and Björn Vollan. 2025. “The Role of Women in Learning Games and Water Management Outcomes.” PNAS Nexus 4 (8): pgaf243. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf243.