Over the past year, India Development Review, in collaboration with Common Ground, published an eight-part series exploring Commons through different lenses: history, economics, climate, governance, cities, markets, and data. Here is the full series, in order, with a summary of what each piece covers.
- IDR Explains | Commons May 2025 | By India Development Review
This article offers an accessible introduction to the Commons, exploring what they are, why they matter for livelihoods, ecology and social equity, and how they are governed in India. It looks beyond Commons as shared natural resources to also consider cultural, knowledge and digital Commons, while highlighting the importance of “commoning” – the collective practices, institutions, and decision-making processes through which communities care for and govern the Commons. The article also examines persistent challenges, including unclear classification, inadequate data, weak recognition of community custodianship, centralised management, limited grassroots autonomy and the diversity of governance contexts across India. It ultimately makes a case for rethinking Commons governance around community participation, self-management, and context-specific solutions, drawing on examples from across the country.
- Creating a people’s biography of rivers: Northeast’s own digital archive May 2025 | By Vandana Menon
For centuries, rivers in India’s Northeast have shaped the culture and livelihoods of the communities who live along them, from the Lepcha reverence for the Rongyong river in North Sikkim to the boating traditions and folk songs of the Brahmaputra basin in Assam. Much of this knowledge exists only in oral form. This piece follows The River Project, an interactive multimedia archive started in 2023 by filmmaker Vandana Menon and documentary maker Debashish Nandi, where artists, farmers, fisherfolk, and pastoralists work together as co-creators to document traditional knowledge, cultural practices, and lived experiences of climate change. They use memory maps, audio recordings, and photographs to record oral histories and traditional ecological knowledge to build a community-owned archive of the rivers and the lives intertwined with them. The article highlights the importance of community ownership, participatory documentation and locally grounded design, while also reflecting on challenges around access, data rights, cultural interpretation, climate disruptions and the emotional burden of documenting ecological loss.
- What is the value of commons? September 2025 | By Tanupriya Singh and Shreya Adhikari
This piece asks what it means to put an economic number on nature, and whether doing so helps or hurts the case for protecting the commons. It draws on research showing that India’s land commons, covering an estimated 66.5 to 83 million hectares, generate around USD 90.5 billion a year in ecosystem services, with forests accounting for more than three fifths of that value. The article also cautions that economic valuation can risk commodifying nature or overlooking values that cannot be easily monetised. It argues that valuation is most useful when it is community-led and grounded in local knowledge, rights and lived relationships with commons, rather than imposed through market-based frameworks. It explores how such valuations can help communities and civil society make stronger cases against damaging infrastructure and development projects, inform restoration and livelihood programmes, and push for changes in public planning, compensation and budgetary policy.
- Commons and communities: The missing link in climate action October 2025 | By Shreya Adhikari, Srishti Gupta, and Saba Kohli Dave
Forests, wetlands, pasturelands, and coastlines regulate local climates, recharge groundwater, support biodiversity, and store carbon. During droughts, floods, or other shocks, they are often the first source of food, water, fodder, and income that communities fall back on. Despite this, the piece argues, India’s climate policy and planning processes largely leave these ecosystems and the people who sustain them out of the picture. That invisibility has a cost: it overlooks traditional knowledge and existing resilience at exactly the moment climate planning needs both. The article makes the case for recognising communities not merely as stakeholders or project implementers, but as stewards and decision-makers in climate action, drawing on their existing practices of diversification, resource pooling, storage, mobility and local knowledge. It calls for three key shifts: breaking down silos between adaptation and mitigation, strengthening pathways for community stewardship through existing legal and governance frameworks, and putting social justice, benefit-sharing and community participation at the centre of climate and energy solutions.
- Hamaare gaon mein hum hi sarkaar: Reclaiming commons across India November 2025 | By Srishti Gupta and Tanupriya Singh
This piece is about what it looks like when communities take governance of the commons back into their own hands.This piece explores how communities across India are reclaiming their rights to govern and protect Commons through local institutions, legal rights, traditional governance systems and collective action. Drawing on examples from Rajasthan, Sikkim, Maharashtra and Odisha, it shows how mechanisms such as charagah vikas samitis, dzumsa, Gram Sabhas, and federations of Gram Sabhas can enable communities to protect common lands, strengthen livelihoods, and manage natural resources. The piece connects this to the wider legal architecture, including the 73rd Constitutional Amendment of 1992, and the PESA Act of 1996, highlighting the gap between legal recognition and implementation. It comments on bureaucratic hurdles, inadequate information, weak recognition of customary boundaries, and the risk of conservation laws being used to displace communities. A key insight is that community stewardship works best when legal and administrative systems enable – not obstruct – local agency and collective decision-making.
- Poromboke: Reimagining our urban commons December 2025 | By Nupur Khanter
This piece turns to cities. In Tamil Nadu, poromboke is a word for shared, communally used land and water, though it has come to be used as an insult for anything considered worthless, a shift the piece traces back to the same colonial wasteland logic covered in the opening article. Focusing on Chennai, whose eris, or traditional water tanks, have been steadily built over as the city has expanded, the piece proposes “poromboke urbanism”: designing cities around the rhythm of water rather than against it, and treating lakes and wetlands as cultural, ecological, and educational Commons rather than empty space waiting to be developed. The article argues that treating water bodies as shared civic, ecological and cultural assets can strengthen urban resilience, foster community stewardship and transform water from a perceived threat into the foundation of more liveable and climate-resilient cities.
- To link markets with commons, communities must set the terms April 2026 | By Tanupriya Singh
Millions of people across India depend on collecting and selling non-timber forest produce such as tendu leaves and bamboo, but have historically had little say in how those markets are structured or priced. Drawing on examples from Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Odisha, the article shows how gram sabhas and federations are reclaiming control over the collection, sale and value addition of bamboo, tendu and other forest produce. A key insight is that market participation alone is not enough – communities need collective ownership, bargaining power and control over the terms of trade. At the same time, the article cautions against allowing markets to drive Commons governance, arguing that ecological limits and community-defined rules must remain central. Ultimately, it makes the case for community-governed markets where livelihood gains, collective ownership and ecological security reinforce one another.
- Why the commons need community-led data May 2026, the concluding piece | By Aanchal Bansal Gandhi and Shreya Adhikari
India has not conducted a full assessment of its common lands since 1998, and individual districts have lost between 1 and 32 percent of their Commons since then. This final piece argues that the gap is not a lack of knowledge on the ground, communities already hold deep ecological knowledge through oral tradition and lived experience, but a lack of systems built to capture and use it. It follows four examples: Gram Sabhas in Jharkhand’s Dumka district using an app to prepare data backed proposals for water and livelihood projects; communities in Kalahandi, Odisha, GPS mapping their own forest boundaries after officials used GIS technology to shrink the forest areas being legally recognized; Baiga Adivasi communities in Chhattisgarh mapping food forests and tracking which wild foods and medicinal plants are disappearing as rainfall patterns shift; and a tidal flood forecasting platform in Kerala’s Ernakulam district, built with Kudumbashree women leading the flood monitoring, that helped get tidal flooding declared a state specific disaster in January 2026. The article identifies four priorities for making data work for the Commons: anchoring it in everyday decision-making, embedding it within local governance systems, designing for accessibility and inclusion, and building open, interoperable data ecosystems.
Read the full series on IDR: The Common Ground Initiative