Neoliberal Governance and Urban Environmental Commons

Over the past three decades, cities across the globe have increasingly turned to market-based instruments, public-private partnerships, and devolved governance arrangements which also assume an onus to manage urban nature — from community gardens and pocket parks to street trees, watersheds, and informal green spaces. We propose this session to examine the contested relationship between neoliberal modes of urban governance and the collective, often informal, systems through which residents access, use, and steward shared ecological resources. In this session, we bring together two bodies of scholarship that frequently talk about one another intersectionally- institutionalist urban commons theory, which treats local ecological governance as a design problem amenable to well-crafted rules and devolved authority, and urban political ecology, which treats the same devolution as a strategy for divesting public responsibility onto residents while reorganizing nature as a vehicle for accumulation. We particularly welcome contributions that move beyond the binary of "market enclosure versus authentic commons" to examine the hybrid, contradictory, and often ambivalent forms that urban ecological governance takes in practice. The session invites papers that interrogate these dynamics across diverse urban contexts and methodological traditions, including but not limited to:

Comparative or single-city studies of green space based resource governance under austerity or market-led planning

• Case studies of commoning practices and their incorporation into, or resistance against, neoliberal city-building
• Theoretical interventions bridging urban ecological institutionalism and post-structuralist urban political ecology
• Comparative work on informal ecological commons under conditions of rapid urbanization and state retrenchment