International Association for the Study of the Commons 2013 in Kitafuji, Japan

I’m at the International Association for the Study of the Commons Biennial Meeting where I will be speaking on Friday in two panels that I organized. One of the panels is on Water Governance in Mexico, and the other is on New Theoretical and Empirical Methods to Study Commons. It is in these panels where I’ll be discussing my work on polycentric water governance in Mexico . This 2013 it is hosted in Kitafuji, Japan (in Fujiyoshida City, near Mount Fuji.

I’m really excited not only because I am really good friends with many of the worldwide’s best scholars who study commons, but also because I get to see them in the flesh, and talk about our research. For example, on this photo (not my best photo, I might add), you can see Dr. Leticia Merino (President of the IASC and a full professor at the Institute for Social Research at UNAM in Mexico), and Dr. Natalie Ban (Assistant Professor, University of Victoria in Mexico). Both of them are very close friends of mine.

As it so happens, Leticia has been a mentor to me for many years, and Natalie did her PhD in the same program as I did. I also have been able to meet up with other friends and colleagues from other countries who do scholarly research on the commons as I do, and people with whom I have corresponded but had not met in advance. I have to praise the organizing committee as the conference has been so far, operating seamlessly.

What I have found so far is that the range of topics is incredibly vast. I’ve not had a chance to check the anti-commons and negative commons sessions, which I think are rather important. But I had a chance to listen to Dr. Bonnie McCay, someone whose research I respect quite a lot, give a solid keynote on tragedies and comedies of the commons. You can check Bonnie’s talk here (courtesy of the IASC’s YouTube):

Overall, I am quite impressed with the organization of the conference (with VERY reliable wifi!), and an incredibly exciting set of research streams in the conference program. Kudos to the organizers, volunteers and participants in IASC 2013. You can check the Twitter stream searching the hashtag #IASC2013, check out my Flickr photo sets for IASC 2013 here).

The only thing I wish that had happened here was that more of my academic colleagues tweeted about the conference!

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