GOVERNING FORESTS AS COMMONS, BEYOND EFFICIENCY: CAPABILITIES, CONFLICTS, AND COMPLIANCE WITH SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AGREEMENTS

What we are facing today is a situation of ecological and democratic crisis, necessitating deep and multilayered transformations, which should go into the direction of tackling both inefficiencies and inequalities. The aim should be to develop a new way of co-existing that does not eliminate differences but exploits their creative potential in a democratic way. The sustainability transformations we need must be radical, and that is why they raise concerns. They are neither win-win nor zero-sum processes: they can bring to mutual advantage, but distributional conflicts are inevitable and, as such, they must be acknowledged and made visible. Within this scenario and looking at its possible developments, the literature on the commons can offer a potential ground to analyse and direct sustainability efforts. This paper-based dissertation zooms into the notion of commons to understand whether collaborative outcomes are feasible, which transform social, political, and economic relations while addressing the environmental and democratic crisis. Specifically, it focuses on forest governance and forests-related conflicts as emblematic of the current multiple and entwined crisis, as addressing forest deterioration and depletion is also an issue of recognizing people’s opportunities (capabilities) to look for and pursue aspirations, social identities, and flourishing lives attached to forests (Ballet et al., 2018). The main overarching question is about whether governing forests as commons can counteract reductionism and enhance democratic coexistence also with a view to promote socio-environmental justice. To answer this, the dissertation takes an interdisciplinary approach, mostly drawing from political economy and institutional economics, but also from political science, political philosophy, and political ecology. The first paper is the result of a systematic review of literature on carrying out balancing exercises in the governance of complex socio-ecological systems from the commons and capability approach scholarships. This work develops an integrative framework that connects the two and can serve as an informational and evaluative tool for institutions and policies aimed at governing co-existence in multiple-use forests. The second article instead digs into the ex-ante processes that can bring to well-designed polycentric governance, which translates values and claims’ heterogeneity into institutional heterogeneity. In particular, the paper highlights the role of conflict in these processes and sheds light on how corollary theories can improve the understanding of these dynamics, which the polycentricity literature has mostly overlooked. Finally, the third paper deals with ex-post compliance with multi-stakeholder agreements for new forest governance arrangements that promote environmental protection together with socio-environmental justice. Specifically, the article analyses the case in which a business company with strong economic power is involved, which can defect and abuse the most marginalized stakeholders, i.e., indigenous communities. Thus, this article also deals with the possible divide between environmental protection and social justice. Overall, the dissertation defines the commons as institutional and social mediators between the ecological and the wellbeing dimensions and, as such, it proposes to analyze and evaluate their normative implications through the capability approach to justice. The reasoning adds to previous contributions on the issue of ecosystem services as socio-ecological services, i.e., services that do not automatically come from nature but are co-produced by human interactions. Importantly, this thesis finds that such co-production most often involves conflictual processes that can be read as two-level collective action problems where different collectivities bring different and competing claims over the same resource, and struggle for recognition of their stake on it. Thus, for democratic co-existence to emerge, conflicting parties must recognise their interdependence as a positive one, which sets the basis for integrative negotiation and deliberation. Then, choosing a new arrangement for forest governance is a matter of equilibrium selection, where different equilibria imply different distributional effects and a possible divorce between environmental and social objectives. This dissertation suggests that an impartial agreement can be of help in directing such equilibrium selection towards the fairest solution, by eliciting preferences and reciprocal expectations such that conformity with it can emerge endogenously. Thus, efficiency and equity can potentially be kept together. Certainly, this dissertation opens avenues for further research, including investigating an operationalization of the integrative framework, exploring mixed-methodologies to map and measure heterogeneity of claims over complex socio-ecological systems, and carrying out empirical investigations on why certain beliefs and expectations on a socio-environmental equilibrium should emerge, with a focus on the role of culture in this.