The Market as a Commons Workshop: Developing a Comparative Framework for Investigating Cultural Resources in Regional Economies

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With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Colloredo-Mansfeld will host twenty-one scholars in a two-day workshop that examines how communities use cultural assets in order to develop local economies. In particular, the workshop will assess how theories of the commons that explain natural resource systems can be adapted to investigate cultural resources. Indeed, unique, heritage-based resources have found prominence in the global economy. Many communities have sought legal protection for place-based crops, handcrafted commodities or ethnically identified wares. Other communities turn to cultural claims to restore economic value to traditional manufacture and commercial trades. The workshop aims to build an analytical framework that will allow comparison across such regional economies. The two day gathering will bring together an international group of scholars from the United States, England, Belgium and Australia who are currently researching artisan communities, indigenous cultural heritage, local food economies, and natural resource commons. Participants will divide their effort into four primary sessions: (1) the identification and valuation of cultural assets; (2) the description of interactions that generate cultural assets; (3) the place-based strategies that link culture and economy and shape the defense of regional trades; and (4) moderated round table discussions to narrow a research agenda and enable collaborative research projects. The central intellectual task is to connect research on local trades to the commons literature. Writers on law, popular culture, indigenous heritage, and technology, have embraced the idea of the commons to explain the importance and vulnerability of shared resources in a globally connected economy. However, work needs to address the crucial differences between assets that form within market systems themselves and forests, fisheries and pastures that stand apart from markets and become exploited as their products gain economic value. Participants in the workshop will develop the analytical terms to describe cultural resources, identify patterns of competition and cooperation that build these shared assets, and document rules, settings, and strategies used to defend resources against appropriation by powerful outsiders or over-exploitation by local producers. The objective is to articulate practical research questions that will allow researchers to return to their field sites and data sets to assess the use of cultural assets and compare their results. This workshop will set up an international collaboration that contributes to training, engaged scholarship, and policy work. In practical terms, UNC-Chapel Hill's Center for Integrating Research and Action (CIRA) will both provide support for the dissemination of project-related research and serve to promote graduate training rooted in the workshop's models. More broadly, the planned follow-up for the workshop in terms of research, a symposium, and publication will enable pathways of participation for other scholars, policy makers and potential graduate students seeking to engage and evaluate the workshop's model.