The new forest commons: Commons re-development and their transformative potential from a territorial perspective
Résumé
Recently, the common “movement” gained traction on both political and academic fields. Commons tend to
become a concept through which activists, thinkers, project initiators or opponents are defined or define
themselves as commoners. Although forest commons remained aside of the so-called “third wave” of the
commons studies, which tended to enlarge the scope of the analysis to knowledge and informational
resources, their role is getting central again in view of the recent developments. The rise of environmental,
social and economic concerns over the past decades replaces forest at the heart of global, national and local
debates. This shift turned forests into multifaceted objects and opened new debates at the global scale yet
also – albeit less studied – at the territory scale. This leads to the question of how these new territorial
commons are technically, socially and politically constructed and what they envision. The ambition of this
paper is to contribute to the discussions on the renewed roles of the commons from a territorial
development perspective, including methodological ones, based on our empirical results. To do so, we
spotlight projects carried by collectives of citizens and public actors that try to revive forest commons in a
wider perspective, as catalysts for development and governance at different scales. We especially explore
how different actors get involved in the development of new forest-related commons, how resources are
identified and mobilized and how stakeholders organize themselves to support or reject these initiatives.
Data were mainly collected through in-field interviews as well as participatory workshops on three well
afforested and contrasted French regions. We show that forest commons are often developed with the
intent to contest or to contribute to territorial development trajectories and to propose alternative
resource management practices. We argue that neither a particular project nor a collection of property or
use rights alone constitute this new type of forest common. Instead, they result from a cumulative nested
web of initiatives carried by local actors that translate commons into tangible experiences. What remains
uncertain and will be further discussed is the extent to which these experiences pave the way for a broader
territorial transition.