Common Ground - Living Landscapes

The Common Ground Initiative

Leveraging the Commons to address linked crises of livelihoods, climate, and equity, through a system-wide collaborative action framework.

The Challenge

The ecological Commons (community forests, pasture lands and water bodies) cover a quarter of India’s landmass and are a lifeline for more than 350 million rural people. Despite growing commitments to climate action, landscape restoration and rural livelihoods,

these commons are degrading at an alarming rate of 4% a year.

At the heart of the challenge are deep structural barriers, top-down development approaches and a lack of focused ecosystem level engagement, impeding meaningful change:

Ecological considerations and local priorities (esp. of women and marginalised) are de-prioritised in our drive for economic progress.
Collectively held shared resources (such as Common lands) are not as effectively protected by laws of ownership (as private or state-owned property are).
Popular mindsets are often biased against the ability of rural people, particularly women, to manage their own affairs.
The many initiatives of civil society, government, and market actors to engage with these issues are often siloed, sometimes at cross-purposes, and progress on the ground is far too slow.
Government capacity, private sector incentives, technological reach to the people on the ground, and civil society influence are each insufficient to catalyse the change required.

The Change We Seek

Common Ground adopts a two-pronged strategy:

Addressing the deeper structural shifts confronting environmental governance and rural livelihoods.

Pathways for Action:

Strengthen effectiveness of grassroots actors and channel voices of local communities, women in particular.
Embed ecological and social considerations in policies, programmes, and investments.
Promote space for equitable negotiation between rural communities and markets.
Build a social infrastructure of responsive actors and institutions, by catalysing supportive relationships between them, aligning resource flows, and enabling knowledge systems.

Nurturing a system-wide collaborative infrastructure to connect, convene, and align diverse actors for coherent action, finding ‘common ground’ even in the absence of full agreement.

Intervention Strategies to Build a System-wide Infrastructure for Collaborative Action:

Convening dialogue platforms
Co-creation of public goods
Collective learning
Collective championing of solutions
Orchestration across diverse initiatives and actors

Bringing together the aspirations and wisdom of actors from civil society, government, tech initiatives, corporates to strengthen the capacity of the entire ecosystem of solutions for the Commons.

Common Ground Signatories

Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies (IIT-Bombay)

Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability (TISS Mumbai)

Centre for Research in Regions and Development (CRRD)

Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN)

Our Funders

If you’d like to fund us please get in touch.

Partner With Us

Time is ticking for the Commons so we need to act with urgency.

We need to bend the arc towards nature and peoples’ agency – helping communities come together to author their stories and champion their futures.

Common Ground has been taking shape with 22 organisations as co-signatories. The initiative is supported by Living Landscapes which brings in decades long combined experience of building, running and enabling collectives.

We are looking to partner with all organisations, initiatives and individuals committed to the Common Ground change pathways.

Through these partnerships, actors aligned with the Common Ground vision for change will collaboratively expand spheres of influence, spur innovation, and create non-linear impact.

Each of us is on a unique point in our journey with learnings to give and receive. To be a part of the larger picture – start a conversation with us –
[email protected]

Targeted 5-Year Impact at the Local Level

In the next five years, Common Ground aims to reach 75 million Commoners, of which at least 37 million will be women – for durable livelihood gains and enhanced resilience to economic and environmental shocks and stresses.