Awareness of environmental degradation has stimulated inquiry into the relationship between humans and the environment, increased the demand for ecological conservation, and contributed to the idea of "sustainable development". Community based decision-making has emerged as a crucial focus in environmental management and sustainable development research. This dissertation examines community based environmental decision-making in an area where traditional institutions for communal land holding are facing pressures of modernisation. The dissertation examines the potential, limitations and challenges these institutions face, from a community based perspective, if they are to function as effective vehicles for local environmental management and sustainable development. Drawing on the United Nations ideas of North-South partnerships for development, and on the recognition that access to information is critical in environmental decision-making; the dissertation also explores academic-community partnerships as a means of enhancing community based environmental decision-making. The research uses a case study approach with qualitative and participatory methodologies to explore traditional and emerging decision-making bodies in a rural, resource-based, community. The study draws on conceptual insights from the fields of conservation, development, environmental decision-making, natural resource management, land tenure and commons property research, and from popular education and participatory research. / Through examining the comunidad of Huitzilac in the state of Morelos, Mexico, this study identifies the importance of the shared history of struggle for land as a factor facilitating collective action in comunidades. The internal organization of comunidades however, is found to present limitations for facilitating community based and sustainable decision-making. Notably, the membership of comunidades is not representative of diverse community based actors and interests, and the mandate of these communal land-holding institutions does not address environmental protection or sustainability. Factors external to community based decision-making structures such as the increased accessibility to markets, perceived changes in conditions for agriculture and governmental conservation policy are found to have repercussions on community based environmental decision-making. Internal and external factors are combined with one another in intricate ways resulting in the weakening of traditional institutions and resulting in environmental degradation and social turmoil. / Academic-community partnerships, studied through the creation and analysis of ACCES, Academic and Community Cooperation for Environmental Sustainability, were found to contribute to community based environmental decision-making by creating conditions for community organizing and action for groups marginalized from the traditional communal decision-making mechanisms. Through a process that integrates popular education and academic research, characterized by flexibility, the promotion of information and awareness, and the promotion of values such as trust and cooperation, academic-community partnerships can facilitate community based organizing for environmental decision-making and action.

This study describes the resource management practices of a rural community located in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. Lababia, a community of 500 people, is located in a coastal rainforest environment and is dependant for its livelihood on swidden agriculture and fishing. Lababia is also the site of an integrated conservation and development project facilitated by a non-governmental organisation based in a nearby urban centre. / The key resources on which Lababia depends are managed as the common property of either the village-as-a-whole or the various kin groups resident in the village, and for that reason common property theory has been used to inform the design of the research project and the analysis and interpretation of research results. However, the social foundations of resource management systems and the influence of external factors, commodity markets in particular, are not adequately represented in some of the more widely used analytical frameworks developed by common property theorists. These factors are of fundamental importance to the Lababia commons because of the many social, political and economic changes that have occurred there over the last century. For that reason the Lababia commons is referred to as a commons-in-transition . / Ethnographic and historical analysis, informed by common property theory, is used to develop a description of the property rights system existing at Lababia and resource management practices in the key sectors of fishing and agriculture. The management of forest resources is described on the basis of a comparison with Kui, a nearby village that, unlike Lababia, has allowed industrial logging activities on their lands. The impact of the conservation and development project on village life is also assessed and the study concludes by developing an analytical framework suitable to the Lababia commons and one that facilitates the development of policy appropriate to the planning of sustainable development projects generally and conservation and development projects in particular.

This study focuses on the Nordic model of Extended Collective Licenses (ECL) and how this model can be used in the process of digitalising and publishing archival material such as photos, letters, maps or films. The question that this study aims to deal with is what advantages, and disadvantages, there are for archives and copyright holders when an ECL is being used. To help answering this question the ‘theory of the knowledge commons’ has been applied. The research question has been answered through a text analysis based on legal texts including Swedish law. To get a wider perspective, international literature such as official and law-binding documents from the Nordic countries and the European Union have also been consulted. Policies and contributions to the debate about making cultural heritage available online have also been included to give light to the complexity of the question. In 2013 the Swedish copyright law was changed to facilitate for certain archives and libraries to sign an agreement with a so called Collective Administration Organization (CAO). There are no examples of ECLs being used by Swedish archives for classical archival materials even if the possibility to draw up this type of agreements has existed since 2005. One of the reasons might be the complexity of the law and that the archival institutions have problems of interpreting it. The institutions often avoid providing access to their materials online or choose material they know is in the public domain already. Finding copyright holders before publishing material online is time-consuming. One of the major advantages of functional ECLs is that they save time and resources – both for the archival institutions and the copyright holders. The ECLs provide an opportunity for the archival institutions to share their collections with the public and the copyrights holders get an organized way to communicate their terms and conditions. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies.

This thesis on water and social activism in Canada is a journey into the realm of shared social understanding. Water is too precious to all forms of life to simply permit commodification for the benefit of a few at the expense of the many. The Sun Belt case adjudicated under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) when compared with what prevailed under previous Canadian national law reveals severe limits to state sovereignty. A high measure of support has already been manifest around concerns and considerations which pertain to water and the potential for the growth of social activism with reference to water may well be unprecedented in Canada. There are fundamental inequalities found within the Sun Belt case. Current international trade policy coupled with private banking practices does not value the principles of sustainability, equality and justice because it is committed to the commodification of the “commons”. This thesis uses a variety of sources to oppose the present discourses followed by governments according to the doctrines found in the study of classical economics within a capitalist context.

Thesis (M.C.S.)--Regent College, 2000. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-81).

Thesis (M.C.S.)--Regent College, 2000. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-81).

Thesis (M.A.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Geography, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.C.S.)--Regent College, 2000. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-81).

This thesis on water and social activism in Canada is a journey into the realm of shared social understanding. Water is too precious to all forms of life to simply permit commodification for the benefit of a few at the expense of the many. The Sun Belt case adjudicated under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) when compared with what prevailed under previous Canadian national law reveals severe limits to state sovereignty. A high measure of support has already been manifest around concerns and considerations which pertain to water and the potential for the growth of social activism with reference to water may well be unprecedented in Canada. There are fundamental inequalities found within the Sun Belt case. Current international trade policy coupled with private banking practices does not value the principles of sustainability, equality and justice because it is committed to the commodification of the “commons”. This thesis uses a variety of sources to oppose the present discourses followed by governments according to the doctrines found in the study of classical economics within a capitalist context.

Institution mythique du monde de la photographie, l’agence Magnum, fondée en 1947 par un groupe de photographes entrepreneurs, est plus qu’une coopérative. Dans l’histoire de la photographie de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, c’est un modèle prestigieux pour l’ensemble de la profession, qui revendique son excellence et défend un canon d’images d’exception. Magnum ne serait-elle pas davantage une académie,institution éternelle et renommée, où l’on entre par cooptation ? Cette thèse propose, à partir de l’étude d’archives inédites, de retracer l’histoire de Magnum. Le prisme académique permet d’articuler l’évolution économique d’une entreprise, l’analyse des images produites, le récit des débats d’un groupe de photographes, l’histoire de leurs rêves collectifs.La première partie interroge les sources de l’académie, à commencer par la propagation du mythe Magnum et les dix premières années d’existence, lorsque l’agence fait corps avec le monde cosmopolite de l’après-guerre. La deuxième partie analyse le renouvellement académique de la fin des années 1950 à 1981, de la refondation d’une photographie engagée dans l’urgence mémorielle des années 1960,à la réponse cynique face au péril conformiste et commercial des années 1970, en passant par la dialectique coopérative qui déchire et réconcilie les membres. La troisième partie montre comment l’académie revendique son immortalité de 1981 à nos jours, s’imposant comme un monument patrimonial et une référence sur le web, et revient sur l’histoire des femmes à Magnum.Cette thèse met en lumière un chaînon méconnu de la production des photographies.Magnum est un point nodal qui définit la valeur économique des images, leur statut juridique, leurs usages commerciaux, journalistiques, documentaires et artistiques au sein de circuits de diffusion et de légitimation. Plateforme d’échanges partagée par plusieurs auteurs, Magnum invite à repenser, à l’heure de l’économie collaborative connectée, l’histoire et le rôle des « communs ». / Founded in 1947 by a group of entrepreneurial photographers, Magnum Photos, amythic institution in the world of photography, is more than a cooperative.Throughout the second half of the 20th century, it remained a prestigious model for the whole profession, claiming its excellence and promoting a canon of exceptional images. More than a mere agency, may Magnum be seen as an academy, a prestigious institution whose access is controlled by peers? The concept of an “academy” brings together the economic evolution of a business, the analysis of the pictures produced,the account of numerous debates amongst photographers, and the story of their collective dreams.This dissertation offers to retrace Magnum’s history, based on the study of unpublished archives. The first part investigates the sources of the academy, starting with the dissemination of Magnum’s myth and the first ten years of existence, when the agency was at one with the post-war cosmopolitan world. The second part analyzes the academic renewal from the end of the 1950s until 1981. It explores there-rooting of concerned photography into the memory urge of the 1960s; thecooperative dialectics, which divided and reconciled Magnum members; and the cynical answer to the conformist and commercial threats of the 1970s. The third part demonstrates how the academy claims its everlasting fame from 1981 until today,establishing itself both as a heritage landmark and an online reference; it alsointerrogates the history of women within Magnum.This dissertation sheds new light on a little-known stage of photographs’ production.Magnum is a nodal point defining the economic value of images, their legal status,their commercial, journalistic, documentary and artistic uses within circulation and legitimating networks. As an exchange platform shared by many authors, it invites us to rethink, within the context of a digital and collaborative economy, the history and the role of the “commons”.