4.1.5 The role of care in commoning

Helpful prior knowledge and learning objectives

Helpful prior learning:


Learning objectives:

In Odisha, India, nearly 80% of the rural population depends on subsistence farming, growing food for their own needs. Forests are vital, providing fuel, food, and other resources. When British colonists enclosed these lands for market-purposes, they disrupted traditional forest management. Logging for profits caused rapid land deterioration, leaving local communities without essential resources and struggling to survive. In response, villagers created thengapalli, a system where households took turns patrolling and protecting the forests. This system thrived because of affect.

Affect is the emotional bond people feel toward a place, community, or shared resource. It’s what makes people care deeply about something beyond their own needs. For these villagers, it wasn’t just about saving trees, but preserving their relationship with the land that sustained them for generations. This connection turned forest patrols into respected rituals, where families shared meals, stories, and experiences.

Photograph of women forest guardians in Odisha, India

Figure 1. Women of the Dongria Kondh tribe who protect the forests in Odisha, India

(Credit: jimanish, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Over time, this collective care spread to thousands of villages across Odisha. Even when threatened by timber mafias, villagers protected their forests. Their success highlights how emotional bonds—like belonging, shared responsibility, and identity—can be as powerful as formal laws in sustaining commons. Affect inspires people to protect what they love, transforming commons into spaces of resilience and life.

How does care shape the way people relate to each other and shared resources?

Affective, emotional relationships between people and place are a core part of healthy commoning. Care is essential. But because care is so connected to emotion, we might take it for granted in creating caring communities.

This section explores more social patterns of commoning particularly relevant for care. These are related to and built on Ostrom’s eight patterns discussed in Section 4.1.4.  While these social approaches are very important to commoning, they can also improve the way other provisioning institutions -- households, markets, and states -- function.

Cultivate shared purpose and values

The Odisha villagers’ commitment to protecting the forest began with shared values and a collective purpose: to restore the forests that sustain their communities. 

These values weren’t imposed from outside. They came from a history of interaction with the land and each other. Villagers patrol the forest together, they gather berries, dig for tubers and root vegetables, and collect greens for cooking. They even share meals in the forest. These activities are social events that develop shared values.

Shared values are the foundation of any commons because they help define what people care about and why they are willing to work together. When people see themselves as part of a collective endeavour, they are more likely to contribute and take responsibility.

Photograph of paper cut-out humans holding hands around an illustration of a shared resource

Figure 2. Shared values and collective purpose are the foundation of any commons

(Credit: patpitchaya, licensed from Adobe stock)

Ritualise togetherness

Rituals are regular shared experiences that have meaning for participants and deepen their personal relationships. Through the practice of thengapalli, villagers not only safeguard the forests, but also make a ritual of their togetherness. Each patrol is an opportunity to bond, share knowledge, and create a common identity, showing how much each person values the relationships with each other and the forest. Rituals like sharing meals during patrols, turned these everyday activities into meaningful experiences. 

Ritualising togetherness in commoning experiences helps build trust, social cohesion and social resilience, strengthening the emotional ties of people to one another and to the shared resource. These emotional ties in turn strengthen peoples’ commoning work in a reinforcing feedback loop (Figure 3).

Feedback loops associated with commoning rituals reinforcing emotional bonds with the resource and between people

Figure 3. Reinforcing feedback loops between commoning rituals like thengapolli and the emotional bonds between people, and between people and their shared resources

Contribute freely and practise gentle reciprocity

In the villages of Odisha, people patrol the forests not for pay or other material incentives, but out of a sense of duty and love for their land. They share a commitment to contribute freely and practise gentle reciprocity, a willingness to give without expecting anything specific in return. This approach is rooted in social norms of generosity and a belief that caring for the commons is everyone’s responsibility. 

By contributing freely, villagers create a sense of abundance. They trust that their efforts will return to them in subtle, interconnected and perhaps unexpected ways. This approach prioritises the wellbeing of the whole group over individual gain, reinforcing relationships that strengthen community resilience.

Trust place-based knowledge and deep relationships with nature

The success of the Odisha villagers’ forest conservation efforts is rooted in their place-based knowledge and deep relationships with nature. For generations, they have passed down wisdom about when the forest needs rest, which species to plant, and where illegal logging might occur. This knowledge, built through years of living with and observing the land, is vital for the villagers to be able to respond to the forests’ needs. Place-based knowledge and deep relationships with nature ensure that commons are managed with wisdom, respect, and long-term care.

Photograph of women gathering nuts in a forest

Figure 4. Local knowledge is essential for effective commoning

(Credit: Aishwara Mohanty, in Mongabay with permission )

Preserve relationships in addressing conflicts and reflect on governance

Even the best-designed commons face conflicts and need to adapt to changing situations. In Odisha, disputes can arise over how resources are used, forest boundaries and other issues. The focus of conflict resolution isn’t on winning or losing. It is about preserving relationships and finding solutions that respect the needs of both the people and the forest. This emphasis on maintaining relationships helps prevent conflicts from weakening trust and social cohesion in the community.

The villagers of Odisha regularly reflect on their patrolling schedules, grazing rules, and strategies for forest regeneration. This reflection allows them to adapt their practices in response to changing conditions, ensuring that the commons remains fair, inclusive and abundant. All commoning requires flexibility to ensure that humans remain in the right relationship with each other and the resources they steward together.

icon of two people shaking hands

Figure 5. When conflicts arise, it’s important to preserve relationships when seeking resolution

(Credit: Oksana Latysheva, Noun Project)

The story of Odisha’s forest commons shows that caring for shared care-wealth is about more than rules; it’s about deep connections—with the land, the resources, and each other. Engaging with the commons builds relationships that go beyond self-interest, creating a strong sense of community and purpose that makes the commons resilient and adaptable. Care and affection transform resources into a true commons—a living, interconnected community that protects what it values. 

Activity 4.1.5

Concept: Systems

Skills: Thinking skills (transfer, creative thinking)

Time: 30  minutes

Type: Individual, pairs, or group


What does care look like in different commons contexts?

The example used in this section focuses on the care for forests in Odisha, India. If you’ve spent time in a forest, it’s not difficult to imagine how and why people become more emotionally connected to a forest, and increase care for it when they spend more time there.


But commoning doesn’t only happen with living ecosystems. Humans engage in commoning involving other kinds of resources too. Consider what a deepening emotional connection and care might look like in the following examples, using the approaches discussed in this section to help you make your ideas concrete:



You could:

Checking for understanding

Further exploration

Sources

Bollier, D. and Helfrich, S. (2019). “4. The Social Life of Commoning”.  Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers. https://freefairandalive.org/read-it/

Singh, N. (2017). “Becoming a commoner:The commons as sites for affective socio-nature encounters and co-becomings”. Ephemera. https://ephemerajournal.org/contribution/becoming-commoner-commons-sites-affective-socio-nature-encounters-and-co-becomings

Terminology (in order of appearance)

Link to Quizlet interactive flashcards and terminology games for Section 4.1.5 The role of care in commoning


subsistence farming: where a household or other group produces food mainly to meet their own needs

colonist: a settler in or inhabitant of a colony

enclosure: the process that ended traditional rights on common land formerly held in the open field system and restricted the use of land to the owner

market: a system where people buy and sell goods and services for a price.

profit: total revenue minus total cost

affect: a display of or feeling emotion

care: the act of providing what is necessary for the health, welfare, upkeep, and protection of someone or something

resilient: able to recover after a disturbance

value: ideas about what is important or good

ritual: ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order

social cohesion: the extent to which people in society feel connected to one another and share common values

reinforcing feedback: a situation where change in a system causes further changes that amplify the original change which can lead to tipping points in a system

gentle reciprocity: a willingness to give without expecting anything specific in return

norm: a social rule for accepted and expected behaviour, can be stated or unstated

abundant: when something is available in large quantities

regenerate: the process of restoring and revitalising something

steward: to manage or look after something

care-wealth: shared wealth that is created when people take care of forests, water, data, or urban spaces, and adopt these resources into their shared memory, culture, social lives, and identities

carbon dioxide (CO2): gas produced by burning carbon or organic compounds and through respiration, naturally present in the atmosphere and absorbed by plants in photosynthesis