The new forest commons: Commons re-development and their transformative potential from a territorial perspective

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Recently, the common “movement” gained traction on both political and academic fields. Commons tend tobecome a concept through which activists, thinkers, project initiators or opponents are defined or definethemselves as commoners. Although forest commons remained aside of the so-called “third wave” of thecommons studies, which tended to enlarge the scope of the analysis to knowledge and informationalresources, 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 localdebates. This shift turned forests into multifaceted objects and opened new debates at the global scale yetalso – albeit less studied – at the territory scale. This leads to the question of how these new territorialcommons are technically, socially and politically constructed and what they envision. The ambition of thispaper is to contribute to the discussions on the renewed roles of the commons from a territorialdevelopment perspective, including methodological ones, based on our empirical results. To do so, wespotlight projects carried by collectives of citizens and public actors that try to revive forest commons in awider perspective, as catalysts for development and governance at different scales. We especially explorehow different actors get involved in the development of new forest-related commons, how resources areidentified 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 wellafforested and contrasted French regions. We show that forest commons are often developed with theintent to contest or to contribute to territorial development trajectories and to propose alternativeresource management practices. We argue that neither a particular project nor a collection of property oruse rights alone constitute this new type of forest common. Instead, they result from a cumulative nestedweb of initiatives carried by local actors that translate commons into tangible experiences. What remainsuncertain and will be further discussed is the extent to which these experiences pave the way for a broaderterritorial transition.