The International Workshop on Fairness and the Commons
Socio-economic Strategies
and Resource Dynamics,
is organised by the International
Center for Climate Governance (ICCG) in cooperation
with Princeton University, will
be held in Venice, on October 19^th-20^th, 2009,
and will take place in the magnificent scenario of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini.

Background and Objectives

Sustainably managing the local and the global commons requires not only
an understanding of the environmental factors that affect them, but also
a knowledge of the interactions and feedback cycles that operate between
such resource dynamics and the socio-economic dynamics attributable to
human intervention. This, in turn, calls for an investigation of the behavioral
drivers behind human action.

The workshop aims to bring a multidisciplinary approach to the environmental
challenges inherent in the provision and utilization of the services
originating from common-pool resources. By establishing bridges between
the socio-economic, the ecological and the behavioral traditions, the
goal is to find new insights into the mechanisms that can promote and
sustain cooperation among the end-users of the commons.

The workshop will bring together a broad audience of selected international
researchers from fields ranging from theoretical biology and economics,
to behavioral and computational social science. Such diversity of backgrounds
will promote the exchange of the latest research and policy proposals
among the participants, as well as provide an opportunity to embark
in subsequent common efforts.

Contents and Topics

The workshop is structured around three main sessions.

On the first morning, the emphasis will be placed on establishing
the role of fairness motives and spatial patterns in affecting the
conservation and utilization of the commons.

The afternoon session will provide an opportunity to explore the
resilience of coupled systems, that is of systems characterized by
interactions between the environmental and the socio-economic dynamics,
to endogenous (i.e. behavioral) as well as exogenous (i.e. climate
change) pressures exacerbating the resource scarcity.

The second day’s session aims at drawing some conclusions
and identifying research directions. Particular attention will be
given to the integration of behavioral experiments and environmental
investigations, leading to a general discussion aimed at setting
a common future research agenda.