The International Workshop on Fairness and the Commons: Socio-economic Strategies
and Resource Dynamics, organised by the International Center for Climate Governance (ICCG) and by the Centro Euro Mediterraneo per i Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC) in cooperation with Princeton University, will be held in Venice, on October 19th-20th, 2009, and will take place in the magnificent scenario of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini.
Background and Objectives
Sustainably managing the local and the global commons requires not only an understanding of the environmental factors that affect them, but also a knowledge of the interactions and feedback cycles that operate between such resource dynamics and the socio-economic dynamics attributable to human intervention. This, in turn, calls for an investigation of the behavioural drivers behind human action.
The workshop aims to bring a multidisciplinary approach to the environmental
challenges inherent in the provision and utilization of the
services originating from common-pool resources. By establishing bridges
between
the socio-economic, the ecological and the behavioural traditions,
the goal is to find new insights into the mechanisms that can promote
and
sustain cooperation among the end-users of the commons.
The workshop will bring together a broad audience of selected international
researchers from fields ranging from theoretical biology and
economics, to behavioural and computational social science. Such diversity
of backgrounds
will promote the exchange of the latest research and policy
proposals among the participants, as well as provide an opportunity
to embark
in subsequent common efforts.
Contents and Topics
The workshop is structured around three main sessions.
On the first morning, the emphasis will be placed on establishing the role of fairness motives and spatial patterns in affecting the conservation and utilization of the commons.
The afternoon session will provide an opportunity to explore the resilience of coupled systems, that is of systems characterized by interactions between the environmental and the socio-economic dynamics, to endogenous (i.e. behavioral) as well as exogenous (i.e. climate change) pressures exacerbating the resource scarcity.
The second day’s session aims at drawing some conclusions
and identifying research directions. Particular attention will be
given to the integration of behavioral experiments and environmental
investigations, leading to a general discussion aimed at setting
a common future research agenda.