Introduction

This introduction outlines an approach to commons that captures and responds to intersecting social, environmental, and political complications. The extractive power of states and corporations has long threatened the lives and livelihoods of the poor. However, contemporary local struggles are not adequately understood by frameworks that rest exclusively on social and political power. Climate change and the lingering effects of colonial and industrial extraction multiply the threats to the wider ecologies on which human lives depend. Debates on the commons have addressed such struggles, but without sufficient attention to the diverse bioethical regimes that underpin conventional commons. We propose that such attention can inform analyses by moving beyond the narrow singularities of modern categories. Our introduction lays the groundwork for an approach to the commons that pays attention to multiple and intersecting modes of dispossession, while also looking at convening or ‘commoning’ practices that are oriented toward building alternative relational worlds.