01. August 2025 : Members of the Environmental Economics Department at the 20th IASC Biennial Conference

Between 15 and 20 June, Ioana Branga-Piecu and Juan Felipe Ortiz-Riomalo participated in the 2025 Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC), held in Amherst, MA, United States. Both presented studies co-authored by Stefanie Engel, Ann-Kathrin Koessler, Hannes Campe and David Ramírez-Ramón concerning the potential of perspective-taking and virtual reality and participatory vision-building in environmental management.

The 20th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons, Regenerating the Commons: Addressing Pressing Concerns Through Learning about the Past and Innovating into the Future, was hosted by the University of Massachusetts Amherst on 15 – 20 June. Topics included the potential of multistakeholder platforms for environmental management, public policy, the commons and state-reinforced self-governance, inequality on the management of the commons and illicit economies and the commons. Pre-conference workshops on polycentric governance and a standard for self-governance skills, a keynote by Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson, an excursion to the oldest working fishing seaport in the USA and an introduction to sociocracy were some of the activities that complemented the program.

Ioana Branga-Piecu presented results of a study on the potential of virtual reality to overcome social distance between producers and consumers in the cocoa value chain. Juan Felipe Ortiz-Riomalo, in turn, presented results of work on the potential of participatory vision-building and inducing perspective for pro-social behaviour in environmental management. A blog post by the CGIAR summarises the presentations delivered on the panel Game Frontiers: from understanding collective action to supporting it, in which the research on participatory vision-building was presented.