# Gendering the commons or commoning gender studies ?
## A bibliometric analysis

Hélène Périvier

► To cite this version:

Hélène Périvier. Gendering the commons or commoning gender studies? A bibliometric analysis. 2023. hal-04233812

HAL Id: hal-04233812

https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-04233812v1

Preprint submitted on 9 Oct 2023

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>
GENDERING THE COMMONS OR
COMMONING GENDER STUDIES?
A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS

Hélène Périvier
EDITORIAL BOARD

Chair: **Xavier Ragot** (Sciences Po, OFCE)

**Members:** **Jérôme Creel** (Sciences Po, OFCE), **Eric Heyer** (Sciences Po, OFCE), **Sarah Guillou** (Sciences Po, OFCE), **Xavier Timbeau** (Sciences Po, OFCE)

CONTACT US

OFCE
10 place de Catalogne | 75014 Paris | France
Tél. +33 1 44 18 54 24
www.ofce.fr

WORKING PAPER CITATION

This Working Paper:

Hélène Périvier

Gendering the commons or commoning gender studies? A bibliometric analysis
*Sciences Po OFCE Working Paper*, n° 09/2023.

Downloaded from URL: [www.ofce.sciences-po.fr/pdf/dtravail/WP2023-09.pdf](www.ofce.sciences-po.fr/pdf/dtravail/WP2023-09.pdf)

DOI - ISSN
## ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Hélène Périvier, OFCE-Sciences Po

Email Address: [helene.perivier@sciencespo.fr](mailto:helene.perivier@sciencespo.fr)

## ABSTRACT

Gender studies and commons studies have gradually developed to achieve academic recognition. They share common features regarding their object of study and their mode of development. Both fields are leading to a rethinking the boundaries between private and public spheres, they shed light on the role of social norms in relation to individual choice, they renew the definition of ownership, management and sharing of resources. Both fields pay a specific attention to North-South relations, and to the role that communities and/or traditional knowledge can play in preserving resources. The commons and gender studies rely on collaborations, sharing of concepts and knowledge that go beyond the academic division of sciences through disciplines. This explains why they are often relegated to the margins of knowledge classifications. Bridges between the field of the commons and gender studies have emerged particularly through issues related to the preservation of natural resources with an ecological and a development lens. At last, these two concepts are particularly subject to different appropriations: they are rooted in the academia and are also used for programmatic purposes in a political perspective. There is a back and forth process between the activism and the scientific sphere. Crossing of the two perspectives produces a heterogeneous body of knowledge, analysis and recommendations reflecting the diversity of the two fields. This literature includes theoretical, empirical, historical papers, that switches between analytical approach (emerging from Ostrom's research) and radical critique of capitalism and patriarchy (such as ecofeminism). The purpose of this paper is to report on the diversity of the literature crossing gender studies and the commons to identify new avenues of research. We propose an analytical grid to map this literature and apply it to an original database, Genre&Com, that gathers key papers crossing the two perspectives. The ultimate goal is to facilitate the understanding and appropriation of this double field by different categories of actors (academics, practitioners).

## KEYWORDS

Gender studies, the commons, bibliometry.

## JEL

B54, D70, O35, Z18.
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>
# Gendering the commons or commoning gender studies?*

a bibliometric analysis

Hélène Périvier †

## Abstract

Gender studies and commons studies have gradually developed to achieve academic recognition. They share common features regarding their object of study and their mode of development. Both fields are leading to a rethinking the boundaries between private and public spheres, they shed light on the role of social norms in relation to individual choice, they renew the definition of ownership, management and sharing of resources. Both fields pay a specific attention to North-South relations, and to the role that communities and/or traditional knowledge can play in preserving resources. The commons and gender studies rely on collaborations, sharing of concepts and knowledge that go beyond the academic division of sciences through disciplines. This explains why they are often relegated to the margins of knowledge classifications. Bridges between the field of the commons and gender studies have emerged particularly through issues related to the preservation of natural resources with an ecological and a development lens. At last, these two concepts are particularly subject to different appropriations: they are rooted in the academia and are also used for programmatic purposes in a political perspective. There is a back and forth process between the activism and the scientific sphere. Crossing of the two perspectives produces a heterogeneous body of knowledge, analysis and recommendations reflecting the diversity of the two fields. This literature includes theoretical, empirical, historical papers, that switches between analytical approach (emerging from Ostrom's research) and radical critique of capitalism and patriarchy (such as ecofeminism). The purpose of this paper is to report on the diversity of the literature crossing gender studies and the commons to identify new avenues of research. We propose an analytical grid to map this literature and apply it to an original database, Genre&Com, that gathers key papers crossing the two perspectives. The ultimate goal is to facilitate the understanding and appropriation of this double field by different categories of actors (academics, practitioners).

JEL codes: B54, D70, O35, Z18

Keywords: gender studies, the commons, bibliometry

## 1 Introduction

Since the 1970s, gender studies and commons studies have gradually developed to achieve academic recognition. These fields are quite well institutionalized with specialized scientific journals (e.g. *Gender and Society* and *the International Journal of the Commons*), university departments for

<footnote>*This research has been supported by the French Agency for Development, AFD. I thank Serge Rabier, Stéphanie Leyronas, Maxime Forest, Elise Lehman and the participants of the OFCE's internal seminar for their valuable insights. I am grateful to Frank van Laerhove, Michael Schoon and Tessa Eidelman for sharing their data.</footnote>

<footnote>†OFCE Sciences Po, helene.perivier@sciencespo.fr</footnote>
gender studies<fnref n="1" /> or academic platforms and networks for the commons<fnref n="2" />. Theoretical and empirical research on gender aims at measuring gender inequalities, sexual division of labor, discrimination, analyzing processes of domination, oppression, and exploitation. The field of the commons covers the study of management of tangible or intangible resources by communities or collective organizations and of the preservation of a resource by a community. Both fields are leading to a rethinking of the boundaries between private and public spheres, they shed light on the role of social norms in relation to individual choice, they renew the definition of labor, ownership, management and sharing of resources. They both pay a specific attention to North-South relations, and to the role that communities and/or traditional knowledge can play in preserving resources from an environmental perspective. Both fields share common features regarding their object of study and their mode of development. The commons literature and gender studies are based on collaborations, sharing of concepts and knowledge that go beyond the academic division of sciences and their associated disciplines. This explains why they are relegated to the margins of knowledge classifications.

At last, gender studies and the commons are rooted empirically and conceptually in the academia to produce knowledge and both are also used for political purpose with a back and forth between activism and the scientific sphere. These two concepts are particularly subject to different appropriations, the subject of global political struggles and controversies over their definition or meaning (on the appropriations of the concept of gender see Lombardo, Meier, and Verloo (2012)). The Great Recession of 2008 revived reflections on the commons, then perceived as an alternative to capitalism or state-controlled economies. Similarly, the debates around the commons of the Internet have led to a critique of the rise of privatization, which extended, from the 1990s, to new elements such as living organisms (human genome, seeds for example) or software and databases. This focus points to a “second movement of enclosures” (Boyle 2003) or a “tragedy of the anti-commons” (Heller et Eisenberg 1998) resulting from the multiplication of partial intellectual property rights, which has fragmented access to knowledge. Finally, the awarding of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Ostrom in 2009 was a turning point in the development of the literature on the commons. The feminist perspective has been boosted in the 2000’s by the critique of liberal feminism focused on the rights of women from privileged socio-economic categories to the detriment of the precarious ones (see for example Fraser (2010) or Pochic (2018) ). The #Metoo movement has also been a driving force for the renewal of feminist thought and gender studies in the 2010.

The bridges between the field of the commons and gender studies, feminist studies have emerged particularly through issues relating to the preservation of natural resources from an ecological sustainability perspective and from an economic development perspective. Ecofeminism, which is now experiencing a boom in the academic sphere, is one of the bridges between the commons and gender, and certainly the most visible in public debates. But the articulation between these two fields is not limited to this approach. The crossing of the two perspectives produces a heterogeneous body of knowledge, analysis and recommendations reflecting the diversity of the two fields. This literature includes theoretical, empirical, historical approaches, that alternate between an analytical description of local organizations and a radical critique of the economic and political order based on capitalism and patriarchy.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the diversity of the literature crossing gender and the

<footnote n="1">¹For example, in 1993 the *London School of Economics* has created a department dedicated to Gender studies: LSE *Gender pioneers intersectional, interdisciplinary and transnational teaching and research, addressing the tenacity of gendered power relations and gendered inequalities in times of global transformations*. In France, the academic network of the CNRS, MAGE, *Marché du travail et GEnre* was established in 1995 by the sociologist Margaret Maruani, paving the way to the institutionalization of gender studies in France.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²The Ostrom Workshop was founded at Indiana University in 1973. It gathers the world's top academics, lawyers, economists, policymakers, political scientists, urban and rural developers, and dozens of other disciplines come together. Here, professionals and researchers come together to share solutions to the world's most pressing problems involving communal and contested resources—from clean water to secure cyberspace</footnote>
commons to identify new avenues of research. It does not aim at reporting all the contributions of this double field, but at shedding light on its multiple contributions to the academic knowledge. The ultimate goal is to facilitate its understanding and appropriation by different categories of actors (academics, practitioners). We propose an analytical grid that we apply to an original database, Genre&Com. This database was built from a literature review as exhaustive as possible (up to December 2022). This allows to identify the features of the different approaches mobilized at the intersection of these two domains. To strengthen the analysis, we use data from another bibliometric analysis applied to the commons carried out on the 30th anniversary of Elinor Ostrom's book Governing the Commons (Laerhoven, Schoon, et Villamayor-Tomas 2020). First, we briefly present the two fields. Then, we describe the methodology and the data used of the bibliometric analysis. Finally, we map and describe the literature by applying the grid to the data. In conclusion, we propose a roadmap for future research.

# 2 Why crossing “gender” and “the commons”

## 2.1 Feminist and gender studies

Feminism a political movement that advocates for gender equality and promotes women's rights. It denounces sexism as a system of disqualification of women and the sexual order, as well as patriarchy (Périvier 2020). It is rooted in a complex process of theoretical thought associated with political practices or struggles, that can be called feminist studies. It is therefore anchored in a logic of production of knowledge, that opens a space of intelligibility around gender equality (Fraisse 2022). Considering that power and knowledge are inseparable, feminist epistemology points to the fact that science has not been neutral on multiple ways, and that it has often been used to legitimize power structures within a society (Harding 1991). In the wake of feminist studies, gender studies have developed. It gathers multidisciplinary and international research and studies that analyze power relations, inequalities and discrimination based on sex, gender (including gender identity), sexual orientation, at the intersection with other categories, such as social origin, real or supposed ethno-racial origin, religion, age, disability. Gender is a concept that points to a system of domination made up of a dense web of hierarchical positions, social relations, mechanisms of retribution and assignment of roles determined according to the sex of individuals. Gender studies are at the intersection with other fields and concepts such as decolonial theories (Dietze 2014) or intersectionality (Lutz, Herrera Vivar, et Supik 2016). An important dimension of these internal controversies within those fields concerns the under-representation of specialists from the “Global South” in the gender literature (Medie et Kang 2018).

## 2.2 The multiples dimensions of the commons

Against the “tragedy of the commons” developed by Hardin (1968), Ostrom showed that forms of governance and institutional arrangements based on communities of users were possible and efficient for managing resources. Her work led to the addition of a fourth type of good alongside private goods, public goods as defined by Samuelson (1954), club goods as defined by Buchanan (1965) : common pool resources. There is no resource that would have intrinsic characteristics predisposing it to be managed as a common and not every resource is necessarily intended to be a common. Thus, the definition of the commons by the resource or the goods on which they rely is not satisfactory (Leyronas et Bambridge 2018). A common is a social institution made up of three elements: a resource, over which a set of agents have rights and duties, and whose governance is developed by this community which regulates its use according to a set of rules, according to the evolution of the ecological, social,
and economic context. The definition of the commons as an institution focuses more on the type of organization, of production of rules to manage this resource (Coriat 2017). Commons practices consist of multiple forms of solving collective action problems proposed by communities through the construction of *ad hoc*, and *a priori* horizontal, rule systems. These rules redefine ownership by considering its multiple dimensions. The bundle of rights can be formal or informal, written or oral, but they are always socialized and built by a given community, according to its needs. Finally, the issue of managing production of value and its distribution within the community is negotiated and discussed as part of resource management. The trio "resource, governance, community" can be enriched by the concept of real capacity of individuals, in reference to the capabilities of Sen (2005) and Nussbaum (1997), to participate in governance and access the resource, these are commons of capabilities (Fontaine 2021). These characterizations of the commons are based on a set of social practices. But the concept of the commons also refers to a political paradigm or even an ethic. In this perspective, the commons can be defined as a political principle that designates the association of people who, because they engage in common tasks, produce moral, political, and legal norms to frame their actions (Jourdain 2021). The question is then no longer the resource as such, nor the community to which the individuals belong, but the burden shared by these people, which consists in preserving and transmitting the commons. Dardot et Laval (2014) thus considers the commons as a political principle that "defines a new regime of struggles on a global scale". The social, political, and economic organization by the commons becomes an alternative to a *neoliberal capitalism* by excluding from the market a broader set of goods, services and resources, and alternative to the nationalization of resources as well.

## 2.3 Articulation of both fields

The first way to articulate the two fields is to “gender the commons” by analyzing the status of women in the community, their role in the governance of the resource and the impact the rules on their situation and on gender inequality in general. Indeed, the governance of the commons can strengthen the patriarchal organization of communities by excluding women from the negotiation process. The rules coming from the governance can exclude them from accessing to the resource. Conversely, women’s participation at the negotiating table does not necessarily lead to their inclusion in resource management, as other dimensions such as social status or ethnicity are also decisive. Thus, assuming that interests are homogeneous within the community leads to deny the existence of structures of power, oppression, and domination. Nevertheless, Ostrom did not introduce the gender dimension into her research. She sometimes referred to the fact that these rules could have different effects on the situation of women and men. Łapniewska (2016) textual analysis of Ostrom’s work measures the degree to which gender, or the unequal situations of women and men, are considered in her publications: in a paper published in 1999, Ostrom mentions the role of sex alongside other individual characteristics such as caste, age, ethnicity, clan, class (Ostrom 1999); in a chapter of a collective work published in 2008, she introduces gender into her conceptual grid by mentioning that the rule of management of the commons can be affected by certain individual characteristics of the participants in its development, including sex (Ostrom 2008). However, the gender approach cannot be reduced to the mere addition of a sex category in the analysis. Thus Ostrom’s work is globally gender-blind, including when it mentions processes of control, exclusion, power, hierarchy of domination and inequality<fnref n="3" />.

The second way to associate both concepts is to commoning gender. The radical dimension of gender studies and of the commons studies is reflected in the political demands underlying the two

<footnote n="3">³In an interview published in *Feminist economics* in 2012, she admits that she did not mobilize gender as a key factor in her work but encouraged many of her students to adopt this perspective, such as Esther Mwangi, Ruth Meinzen-Dick and Yan Sun (May et Summerfield 2012a).</footnote>
concepts: denunciation of forms of oppression, appropriation, endangerment of populations, demands for equality or transformation of forms of property, questioning of the economic and political order : capitalism or statism, or patriarchy. This approach is based on the commons as a horizon for ending gender inequalities and allowing the economic emancipation of women. The commons are then idealized as an alternative to the market and an escape from neoliberal dogma and patriarchy.

# 3 Methodology and the data

## 3.1 Description of the analytical grid

To map the key issues that emerge from the intersection between the commons and gender studies, we build an analytical framework. This grid is structured around a double entry for each field : gender and feminism for gender studies and the commons as common resources versus commons as a political principle on the side of the commons studies. The thin border between gender and feminist approaches is based on the following distinction:

* The *gender approach* highlights gender inequalities, forms of domination, exploitation, and oppression.

* The *feminist approach* sets out a normative framework for gender equality. The feminist goal is to build a horizon to overcome patriarchy and promote gender equality.

The boundary between the commons as a mode of managing a resource and the commons as a political principle is unequivocal:

* The *analytical approach* considers the commons as a mode of managing a resource is in line with Ostrom's work. In this perspective, the purpose is to analyze the functioning of the commons in their diversity in terms of the type of resources, the mode of governance or the community.

* The *political approach* considers the commons as a way to transform of societies to supplant capitalism, the market on one hand and public property controlled by the State on the other hand. In this perspective, rather than talking about commons, some authors prefer the notion of commoning<fnref n="4" />.

The intersection of these dual perspectives brings out four main categories of analyses within the gender and commons literature:

The *gender approach* associated with the *analytical approach* of the commons emphasizes the absence of a gender perspective in the analysis of the functioning of the commons. It sheds light on the domination process within the governance of the commons ignored by a literature blind to gender. It raises questions as such : if the commons are a more collaborative and localized and/or traditional modes of management, are they free from any form of patriarchal oppression and/or the application of heterosexual norms ?

The *gender approach* associated with the *political approach* of the commons provide a other frame in which the scope of the commons is extended to include care work within family. The commons

<footnote n="4">⁴‘common’ as a verb rather than as a noun: ‘To speak of the commons as if it were a natural resource is misleading at best and dangerous at worst – the commons is an activity and, if anything, it expresses relationships in society that are inseparable from relations to nature. It might be better to keep the word as a verb. Linebaugh (2007)</footnote>
are then conceived as a political model that can transformed hierarchies, oppression by blurring the boundaries between the private and public spheres.

The feminist approach associated with the political approach of the commons is rooted in the aim of reshaping the economic and political order, particularly with regard to North-South relations, which is likely to be associated with a decolonial reading. In this frame, the commons are an egalitarian and horizontal political principle that goes beyond capitalism and patriarchy. The generalization of the commons is seen as a response to the double oppression suffered by women and the Earth described by ecofeminism (Shiva 2020; D'Eaubonne 2018).

The feminist approach associated with the analytical approach of the commons focuses on the objective of gender equality and its articulation with a local management of a resource via the commons. The processes of nationalization and/or privatization have put an end to commons managed by women. This has weakened their economic status by reducing their decision-making space and control over the resource. In this frame, the market and the state are seen as institutions that reinforce inequalities. This includes also analysis showing that traditional forms of management through the commons can be detrimental to the most precarious women.

## 3.2 The Genre&Com database

The Genre&Com database has been built to map literature crossing the perspective of gender with those of the commons up to December 2022. Following Laerhoven, Schoon, et Villamayor-Tomas (2020), we have started from bibliographies of articles crossing the two fields, and applied a systematic search via Google Scholar. The searches were carried out by cross-referencing keywords such as commons/commoning/common property resources" and "gender/feminist/women" <fnref n="5" />. The corpus of articles comes from academic literature mainly in social sciences published in journals, chapters of collective books, working papers and more rarely from publications in the form of a policy brief. A few journals were reviewed exhaustively or almost exhaustively: *International Journal of the Commons*<fnref n="6" />, *Feminist economics*<fnref n="7" />; *Gender and society*<fnref n="8" />; *Gender, Work and Organization*<fnref n="9" />, *World Development*<fnref n="10" />.

<footnote n="5">⁵In French, the keywords were "communs" and "genre", "féminisme", "femmes".</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶The International Journal of the Commons (IJC) is an initiative of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC). As an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed open-access journal, the IJC is dedicated to furthering the understanding of institutions for use and management of resources that are (or could be) enjoyed collectively. These resources may be part of the natural world (e.g. forests, climate systems, or the oceans) or they may emerge from social realities created by humans (e.g. the internet or (scientific) knowledge, for example of the sort that is published in open-access journals).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷Feminist Economics is a peer-reviewed journal that provides an open forum for dialogue and debate about feminist economic perspectives. By opening new areas of economic inquiry, welcoming diverse voices, and encouraging critical exchanges, the journal enlarges and enriches economic discourse. The goal of Feminist Economics is not just to develop more illuminating theories, but to improve the conditions of living for all children, women, and men.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸Articles appearing in Gender & Society analyze gender and gendered processes in interactions, organizations, societies, and global and transnational spaces. The journal primarily publishes empirical articles, which are both theoretically engaged and methodologically rigorous, including qualitative, quantitative, and comparative-historical methodologies.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹Launched in 1994, Gender, Work & Organization was the first journal to provide an arena dedicated to debate and analysis of gender relations, the organization of gender and the gendering of organizations. Since then Gender, Work & Organization has published multi-disciplinary, high quality qualitative empirical research on gendered power relations and identities in the study of work and organization exploring issues of inclusion and exclusion. It has also published quantitative work guided by critical epistemologies on issues such as the gender pay gap, flexible work, career patterns, women on boards and access to leadership positions.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰The Multi-Disciplinary International Journal Devoted to the Study and Promotion of World Development also Elsevier's Geography and Economics portals. World Development is a multi-disciplinary monthly journal of development studies. It seeks to explore ways of improving standards of living, and the human condition generally, by examining potential solutions to problems such as: poverty, unemployment, malnutrition, disease, lack of shelter, ...</footnote>
The barriers for researchers from the Global South to publish in international journals (for instance for academics in French-speaking Africa) imply a bias in this literature review. This is one of the limitations of this bibliometric analysis, as the issues of commons and gender in connection with that of economic development and ecological sustainability arise more particularly in these regions of the world. To limit this bias, a specific search was carried out on OpenEdition focusing on the journals VertigO<fnref n="11" />, Echogeo<fnref n="12" /> ou Etudes carribéennes<fnref n="13" />. We analyse the database using Rstudio.

The Genre&Com database includes 204 documents, the majority of which are academic articles (i.e. 176 to which are added 22 book chapters, 3 working papers, and 3 PhD thesis). The database lists 355 authors, 56.9% of whom are women. The academic papers have been published in 112 different journals. 12 different disciplines are represented. The data contains multiple information for each paper (detailed in the appendix). To analyze the literature using the analytical grid, each document was tagged based on the information available in the abstract. We attribute the label “feminist” when at least one of the following keywords are found in the abstract: *feminism/feminist/feminist/feminism, ecofeminism/ecofeminist, patriarchal/patriarchy*. Otherwise, we attribute the label “gender”. We attribute the label “grid” to paper for which at least one of the following keywords are found in the abstract: *struggles, dispossession, social movement, oppression, neoliberalism, consumerism, marxism/Marx, materialism, individualism, transformative, anti-capitalism/anti-capitalist/ capitalism/classe capitaliste, global South, decolonization, liberal, climate justice/justice, degrowth/decommodification/commonization, exploitation, social change, citizenship, militant, new initiative, domination, commun social*. Otherwise, we attribute the label “case”.

## 3.3 The ijc2020 database

To enrich the analysis, we use a database built for the *International Journal of the Commons* on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the publication of Ostrom's book, *Governing the Commons*. This dataset was used to run a bibliometric analysis of the commons literature since the publication of Hardings' paper in 1968 (Laerhoven, Schoon, et Villamayor-Tomas 2020). This database, that we name ijc2020, contains similar information to that available in the Genre&Com database. Information about the citations of the papers is older than in Genre&Com, so these two variables are not perfectly comparable. Regarding disciplinary fields, the two databases are not comparable neither: Genre&Com the disciplines are reported by authors (sometimes with several disciplines for one author), while in ijc2020 the disciplines are filled in by document. We use the ijc2020 as a benchmark for bibliometric analysis. This should be taken with caution because of the differences in collection between the two databases. The ijc2020 database includes 3818 documents and 6668 authors. 44 papers adopt a gender perspective explicitly in the abstract, this represents 1.1% of the papers listed in the ijc2020

<footnote n="11">¹¹Founded in 2000, VertigO is an interdisciplinary scientific journal of natural sciences and human sciences whose articles are subject to the usual rules of evaluation by a peer committee. It ensures the promotion and dissemination within the Francophonie of research and scientific analyzes on major contemporary environmental problems. In less than 8 years, it has succeeded in establishing itself internationally as the first French-language electronic journal in importance in the field of environmental sciences (http://vertigo.revues.org).</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹²The electronic journal EchoGéo, created under the aegis of the PRODIG laboratory, aims to build a bridge between the research community and the public of specialists or enlightened amateurs sensitive to clear, scientific and relevant information. Our ambition is to provide everyone with geographical information that is tracked and scientifically validated on Societies, the Environment and Development.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³Crossed perspectives of academics from the Caribbean and the world, original work by young researchers and experienced researchers, Caribbean Studies is a space for scientific expression whose main support is the Caribbean basin. Geography, planning, economics and social sciences (history, sociology, anthropology): through a multidisciplinary approach, this journal contributes to reflection on the development of the Caribbean space. The journal offers three annual issues organized around a central thematic file. The texts published, in French, in English, in Spanish, are evaluated by an international scientific committee. Journal supported by the Institute of Human and Social Sciences of the CNRS.</footnote>
database, for 83 authors. Informations on these papers were completed, updated and added to the
Genre&Com database, that contained initially 160 documents.

# 4 Bibliometric analysis

## 4.1 The dynamic of publication

The articles listed in the Genre&Com database mobilize various notions echoing the commons, most often in connection with environmental issues and the transformation of agriculture through agrarian reforms. Different formulations are used to designate the commons such as: *village common* (Agrawal, 1992); *community property regimes* or *common property resource* or *common property* or *community* (Quiggin, 1993; Rocheleau et al., 1997; Davidson-Hunt, 1995; Agarwal, 1995); *communal tenure system* (Carney, 1993); *land rights* (Agarwal, 1994) or *property rights* (Meinzen-Dick et al. 1997; 2001); *commons* (Taylor, 2003; Brownhill et al., 2005); *property status* (Bedi et al., 2011); *rights-based access* (Bose et al., 2011).

Research crossing gender and the commons is not recent: the database includes papers published in the early 1990s. Since then, it seems that a certain dynamic has taken hold, as shown in figure 1. But the comparison with the evolution of the literature on the commons leads to mitigate this finding. Indeed, while the literature on the commons took off quite clearly in the 2000s, in particular since the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom in 2009, no similar momentum is observed for the literature on gender and the commons. The boom observed in 2019 is partly due to the publication of a special issue of the *International Journal of the Commons* dedicated to the gender approach of the commons<fnref n="14" />. This publication is the sign of a growing recognition of double field.

<footnote n="14">¹⁴Feminist political ecologies of the commons and commoning, (vol. 13, n°1), edited by Floriance Clément, Wendy Harcourt, Deeepa Joshi and Chizu Sato.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1: Evolution of the number of publications within the gender and the commons fields</figcaption></figure>

The Genre&Com database includes 112 journals (compared to 1887 for the ijc2020 database excluding the articles integrating a gender perspective). Laerhoven, Schoon, et Villamayor-Tomas (2020) note a dispersion in the journals dealing with the commons, leading to a fragmentation of the knowledge produced and a lack of visibility of this field of research. One of the motivations for the creation of the *International Journal of the Commons* (IJC) was thus to facilitate the accumulation of knowledge by offering support dedicated to this specific object of study that are the commons. This observation is valid for gender studies, specialized journals, such as *Gender & Societies* or *Work, Organization and gender* or *Feminist Economics*, have offered support to academic contributions dedicated to this field of research. The double field of gender and the commons suffers from the same dispersion, which is due to their cross-disciplinary dimension. While there is no specific journal dedicated to the gender studies and the commons, three journals stand out: *World development*, *International Journal of the Commons* and *Feminist economics*. All three appear in the list of journals listed in the general database on the commons ijc2020 and in the Genre&Com database. With regard to literature crossing gender and the commons perspectives, these three journals are the most important, hosting 36% of publications crossing these two approaches. *World Development* publishes more than 15% of this double literature, almost as many as the *IJC*, that is entirely dedicated to the commons with 16% and more than *Feminist Economics* that publishes less than 5%. *World Development* is a multidisciplinary monthly journal dedicated to development studies; it exists since 1983. *Feminist economics* is a quarterly journal that exists since 1995. The *IJC*, which was created in 2007, is more recent than the two others. In addition, it only publishes two issues per year. This explains the ranking of these three journals with regard to the number of publications crossing the perspective of gender and that of the commons. Figure 2 details the representation of those for which more than five articles were listed. Beyond the three main journals already mentioned, we note that journals dedicated to environmental issues (such as *Ecological economics* or *Journal of environmental economics and management*) are particularly represented in the field of the commons only or that of gender and the commons.
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2: Main journals publishing in the double field gender and the commons</figcaption></figure>

## 4.2 Pluridisciplinarity, collaboration and dissemination

The field of gender research and that of the commons share the characteristic of being open to multidisciplinarity approach: not only are collaborations between people with different backgrounds common, but, moreover, researchers working in these two fields often have a multidisciplinary training. The Genre&Com database was built by providing information for each author on their disciplinary background (one author can be associated with several disciplines). As mentioned previously, in the ijc2020 database, the discipline is provided by document and not by author. In what follows, we then use Genre&Com and ijc2020 separately.

Figure 3 gives the representation of each discipline as a percentage of occurrences in the Genre&Com database. Economics and sociology are the most represented disciplinary fields, each represents around 20% of the disciplines in the double field, followed by environmental studies, then geography and urban studies; political science only comes after, with less than 10% of occurrences. The domination of economics and sociology is probably due to the fact that the concept of gender and feminist studies are more embedded in the social sciences and in sociology in particular (see figure 3).
Economics has the specificity of combining an interest in the commons and more recently in gender. It should be noted that to judge the relative weight of each discipline within the gender and the commons literature, it would be appropriate to take into account their respective importance in all scientific publications. It is therefore likely that the relative weight of environmental studies would be increased compared to that of economics or sociology, insofar as this disciplinary field seems *a priori* more represented in gender and the commons literature than it is in all scientific publications.

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3: Disciplines represented in the double field Gender and the commons</figcaption></figure>

Source: Genre&Com

Source: ijc2020

Economics, sociology and environmental studies are the most represented. The exhaustive inventory of the publications of certain journals, such as Feminist Economics and World Development, may imply a bias in the representation of disciplines. To explore the role played by the three main journals, we reproduce Figure 3 and successively removing these three main journals. Figure 4 shows the disciplinary distribution according to the number of occurrences of all the journals, then of the
journals excluding *Feminist Economics*, then *World Development* then the *IJC*. We note that the first two have a similar disciplinary anchoring, at least on this restricted field of gender and the commons, in particular with economics, whereas the IJC is more oriented towards environmental studies (as defined in the appendix).

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4: Disciplines represented in the double field according to the journal</figcaption></figure>

Source: Genre&Com

To better understand the importance of collaborations between disciplines, we calculate the number of disciplines mobilized per document, which is possible with regard to the information available in the Genre&Com database but not ijc2020. On average in the Genre&Com database, there are 2.7 disciplines per document, which indicates a high degree of multidisciplinarity. Figure 5 gives the percentage of documents according to the number of disciplines per document. More than 30% of the documents in the Genre&Com database rely on three different disciplines (as defined above).
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5: Pluridisciplinarity per publication within the double field gender and the commons</figcaption></figure>

Among the 355 authors of gender and the commons literature, some stand out for their particularly important contribution. Table 2 lists the authors with more than three publications in the Genre&Com database. There are two emblematic researchers in feminist studies: Bina Agarwal and Sylvia Federici and two specialists in the commons, Ruth Meinzen-Dick and Esther Mwangi, mentioned by Elinor Ostrom among the researchers she has encouraged to pursue this dual path of gender and commons (May et Summerfield 2012b). In view of the under-representation of authors from the Global South in academic literature, it is noteworthy that 2 of the 6 authors mentioned above are from there.

<table><caption>Table 2: Main contributors to the literature Gender and the commons</caption><thead><tr><th colspan="2">Contributors with more than 3 publications</th></tr><tr><th>Authors</th><th>Nbre of publications</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Meinzen-Dick,Ruth</td><td>12</td></tr><tr><td>Agarwal,Bina</td><td>11</td></tr><tr><td>Federici,Silvia</td><td>7</td></tr><tr><td>Zwarteveen,Margreetz</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>Larson,Annem</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>Mwangi,Esther</td><td>4</td></tr></tbody><tfoot><tr><td colspan="2">Source: Genre&Com.</td></tr></tfoot></table>

Co-authorship is quite widespread in the two fields, whether that of the commons (with approximately 25% of papers having 2 co-authors and 15% with 3 co-authors) or that of gender and the commons
(with a little over 30% of papers written by 2 co-authors and 10% written by 3 co-authors) as shown
in the figure 6.

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 6: Co-authoring within the double field gender and the commons</figcaption></figure>

figure 7 indicates that the gender and the commons papers are quite represented among the papers with a hundred citations<fnref n="15" />. The comparison with the field of commons seems to show that those adopting a gender perspective are cited more, which probably reflects the fact that this field is much more restricted than that of the commons. This reduces the possibilities of citations and increases the citation accumulation dynamic. Among the documents cited at least once, the average number of citations is seven times higher for the gender and the commons field with 170.1 citations per paper against 29.4 for the commons field. The median number of citations is five times higher for the gender and the commons field than for that of the commons in general, with 31. Finally, the paper with the most citations in the field of commons is that of Hardin (1968) with 12,514 citations, while that of the gender and commons field is that of Agrawal et Gibson (1999) with 4249 citations.

<footnote n="15">¹⁵In the two databases Genre&Com and ijc2020, we have information relating to the number of citations for each paper. However, the two are not perfectly comparable insofar as this information was not collected at the same time. However, the number of citations changes over time for certain papers. Thus on the papers common to both databases, the number of citations from the more recent Genre&Com database is systematically higher than that from the ijc2020 database. For this reason, we only look at the Genre&Com database, not counting the “gender” documents from the ijc2020 database.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 7: Citations of papers within the double field</figcaption></figure>

4.3 What types of commons and where?

Research on the commons is often associated with case studies on the local management of a resource
by a community. The Genre&Com database contains precise information on the countries covered by
the various articles as well as on the type of resources or commons on which the analyzes relate. The
same article may be interested in the management of several resources and/or in different geographical
areas. This information is not available in the ijc2020 database.

Regarding the type of commons, there are 11 different types of commons. figure 8 indicates a massive
representation of land, which remains a central concern for the management of property rights,
particularly in low-income countries. Among the big five identified in the literature on the commons
(van Laerhoven & Ostrom, 2007) which are the forest, irrigation systems, fisheries, pastures, water, we find lands/pastures, followed by forest and irrigation/water. On the other hand, fishing is studied as much as care / domestic work and the urban commons are quite well represented. These last two resources or services indeed raise questions that cannot ignore a gender or feminist perspective: care is based on the sexual division of labor and the urban commons are associated with access to public space and safety characterized by gender inequalities. As in the general literature on the commons, we find in the field of gender and the commons emerging topics such as those relating to biodiversity, the climate, the production of knowledge.

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 8: Types of resources/services represented within the double field gender and the commons</figcaption></figure>

Among the documents from the Genre&Com database, 61 countries are studied. Figure 9 give the geographical distribution of these analyzes by country. They indicate a specific prism on Asia and on India in particular. It should be noted that the significant representation of work by Indian researchers, such as Bina Agarwal, who has published extensively on this dual field, partly explains this over-representation of cases relating to India. But it is possible that the modes of organization and the local management of resources in India are carried out more in the form of commons.
<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 9: Representation of countries within the double field gender and the commons</figcaption></figure>

Source: Genre&Com

# 5 Mapping the literature

In order to apply the analytical grid, the documents were tagged to identify the two entries relating to gender studies, the gender approach and the feminist approach, and the two entries relating to the commons, the analytical approach versus the political approach considering the commons as a political principle. figure 10 shows the respective weight, measured in number of publications, of each category. The crossover most often used in the literature combines gender and an analytical approach by case study, with 114 documents, i.e. 55.9% of the entire Genre&Com database. These two entries are those that have been defined by default. The feminist approach is more often crossed with the political approach to the commons than with the analytical approach (with 37 and 23 documents respectively). The feminist perspective is more compatible with the commons as a political principle for the renewal of the economic, social and political order. The least frequent crossover is that which articulates a feminist perspective and the approach to the analytical approach of the commons with 11.3% of the corpus of texts in the Genre&Com database.

The gender approach crossed with the analytical approach of the commons is less multidisciplinary than the other three, with an average number of disciplines per publication of 1.9 against more than 2.25 for the other crossovers (2.4 for the crossover between gender and political approach, 2.22 for the intersection of analytical approach of the commons and feminist approach and finally 2.1 for
that between feminist perspective and the commons as a political principle. On the other hand, this is the intersection in which co-authorship is the most widespread with an average of 2.4 co-authors per publication (1.97 for the intersection of gender and the commons as a political principle, 1.96 for the intersection of a feminist approach and an analytical approach, and finally 1.41. On the other hand, this is the intersection in which co-authorship is the most widespread with an average of 2.34 co-authors per publication (1.95 for the intersection of gender and the commons as a political principle, 2.17 for the intersection of a feminist approach and an analytical approach, and finally 1.53 for the intersection of a feminist and political approach). The approach by the commons as a political principle seems less conducive to co-authorship than that through case studies. Indeed, the type of knowledge produced is quite different: while in the first case it is most often a conceptual reflection, in the second it is an empirical approach, with data collection and sometimes based on experiments, which requires a larger research team.

Table 3 gives the distribution of disciplines within each sub-field. The analytical approach of the commons crossed with that of gender mobilizes the economy more than the other three approaches. Experiments, empirical and statistical analyses are particularly developed in this perspective.

<table><caption>Table 3: Representation of disciplines within each sub-field</caption><caption>Representation of disciplines within each sub field<br>In % of occurrences</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="2"></th><th colspan="2">Analytical approach</th><th colspan="2">Political approach</th></tr><tr><th>Gender</th><th>Feminist</th><th>Gender</th><th>Feminist</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>anthropology</td><td>5.0%</td><td>5.9%</td><td>8.3%</td><td>5.2%</td></tr><tr><td>economics</td><td>21.3%</td><td>15.7%</td><td>11.1%</td><td>9.1%</td></tr><tr><td>engineering</td><td>3.6%</td><td>3.9%</td><td>4.2%</td><td>5.2%</td></tr><tr><td>envir. studies</td><td>15.4%</td><td>9.8%</td><td>13.9%</td><td>11.7%</td></tr><tr><td>gender studies</td><td>2.7%</td><td>5.9%</td><td>2.8%</td><td>5.2%</td></tr><tr><td>geography/urban studies</td><td>10.4%</td><td>11.8%</td><td>16.7%</td><td>11.7%</td></tr><tr><td>miscellaneous</td><td>4.5%</td><td>7.8%</td><td>2.8%</td><td>3.9%</td></tr><tr><td>philosophy</td><td>3.6%</td><td>3.9%</td><td>1.4%</td><td>7.8%</td></tr><tr><td>political science</td><td>14.5%</td><td>5.9%</td><td>11.1%</td><td>11.7%</td></tr><tr><td>regional/cultural studies</td><td>1.8%</td><td>3.9%</td><td>2.8%</td><td>1.3%</td></tr><tr><td>rural/peasant studies</td><td>1.8%</td><td>3.9%</td><td>2.8%</td><td>1.3%</td></tr><tr><td>sociology</td><td>15.4%</td><td>13.7%</td><td>19.4%</td><td>26.0%</td></tr></tbody></table>

Within the analytical approach of the commons crossed with the gender approach, economics represents 21% of the disciplines

Source: Genre&Com

To measure the extent to which the sex of the author modifies this mapping, we produce a graph similar to that presented in figure 10 by counting the number of authors in each of the categories
identified<fnref n="16" />. We see quite clearly that men publish much less than women by adopting a feminist approach and in particular the approach combining feminism and commons as a political principle, as shown in figure 11. This observation is not surprising insofar as historically feminist and gender studies have been produced mainly by women.

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 10: Mapping of the different approaches within the double field</figcaption></figure>

Source: Genre&Com

<footnote n="16">¹⁶Given that it can there are several authors per document, the numbers are higher than in the previous figure which counts the number of documents.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_13.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 11: Mapping of the different approaches within the double field according to the gender of the author</figcaption></figure>

## 5.1 The gender approach

### 5.1.1 Articulation with the analytical approach of the commons

This intersection is the most represented in the databases used in the analysis (Genre&Com or Genre&Com&ijc2020). Part of this literature analyzes the role of the gendered composition of the decision-making committee on the rules of resource management. Among these first analyzes crossing gender and the commons, we find those of Agarwal (1992). It relies on the functioning of what she calls *village commons*, which constitute a mode of common management of resources (such as fodder, fuel, medicinal herbs, water, etc.) at the scale villages in rural India. She points to three major trends: the degradation of the quality and quantity of resources; the process of nationalization of resources that continued after decolonization; the resource privatization process. Agarwal shows that, whatever the organization, the question of gender is central but cannot be enough to understand the relations of power and oppression at work in these modes of resource management. The perspective of gender must be articulated with that of social origin or caste and ethnicity. These different forms of oppression lead to multiple situations, particularly with regard to access to resources and decisions in the management of these resources, which particularly disadvantage poor women in India. Agarwal (2009) extends his work by analyzing the mode of forest management (in India and Nepal) according to the gendered composition of the decision-making committee. Given the great dependence of rural women on the local forest resource, one should expect women to negotiate more flexible rules of use. However, it appears that the strictest rules come from committees including women, with the exception of those in which women who do not own land are particularly represented. Suna, Mwandi and Meinzen-Dick also analyzes the effect of the composition of forest resource user groups on practices, in different national
contexts (in Kenya, Uganda, Bolivia, Mexico) (Suna, Mwangi, et Meinzen-Dick 2011). Groups with
diversity participate more in the decision-making process and are more inclined to adopt an exclusive
use of the resource, while groups mainly composed of women participate less in the decision-making
process, and sanction less in case of non-compliance with the rule and exclude less easily those users.
Similar results were obtained in other contexts (Meinzen-Dick et Zwarteveen 1998; Zwarteveen 1997;
Rap et Jaskolski 2019). Doss et al. (2020) identify the specificities of women's land ownership that
must be taken into account in the monitoring indicators to ensure their sustainability. They provide
a conceptual framework for identifying these various dimensions and the factors that influence them.
The authors show that the privatization of the commons or their nationalization make women more
precarious. Moreover, Levien shows that the dispossession of the commons in the context of agrarian
reforms in different contexts systematically leads to a reduction in the independence of women and
this in a differentiated way according to caste or social origin; it leads to reinforcing their assignment
to reproductive tasks within the household (Levien 2017).

Some papers mobilize an experimental framework to bring to light the mode of cooperation between women and men in the management of a resource. For example, Revollo-Fernández et al. (2016) show that women are less likely than men to extract resources when regulations and sanctions are applied. This result is obtained from experiments conducted in coastal fishing communities in Baja California, Mexico. The authors thus suggest that strengthening the decision-making role of women in the management of the commons associated with an appropriate institutional environment would lead to a more sustainable way of managing the resource.

5.1.2 Articulation with the political approach of the commons

Papers in this perspective are more theoretical and often adopt a critical posture of neoliberalism, of
capitalism from a perspective of North/South relations. Podlashuc (2009) shows how practices of the
commons within autonomous communities, such as precarious women's movements that resist market
practices, and social ecology lead to deconstructing the oppressions of industrial modernity. Te goal
is to substitute the agenda of the populations for that of the elites. Kashwan et al. (2021) propose an
agenda of empirical and theoretical research within the commons to strengthen the bridges between
critical analyzes of private property and environmental justice. The aim is to better understand
how social, economic and political inequalities affect the constitution of the groups that access and
control the resource managed in the form of the commons taking into account for gender, ethnic
origin and social origin. The authors call for pushing the boundaries of the theory of the commons by
exploring the process of commoning or decommoning via "grabbed commons". They also propose to
mobilize the perspective of the commons to show the historical process of colonization and capitalist
dispossession.

5.2 The feminist approach

5.2.1 Articulation with the political approach

This dual approach combines the feminist perspective with the political approach of the commons. It
aims at ending capitalism, or at least controlling it more. A decolonial perspective is sometimes added
to this frame. The ecofeminist movement is in this double perspective. This approach considers that
male domination and the predation of natural resources by productivist societies are linked to each
other. Perkins (2019) offers an overview of the theoretical foundations of the practices of ecofeminists
and of indigenous thinkers in their fight against the fossil economy and market property rights
and of the practices based on commoning. In another context, Milani (2021) analyzes three urban
garden communities in Brussels. The concept of the commons makes it possible to identify gardens
as spaces for commoning practices that use and manage these resources collectively. The ecofeminist approach emphasizes logics of domination that subjugate women, racialized people, or people of disadvantaged social origin. These logics are reproduced within the community or in its relations with the outside world. The authors conclude that these shared gardens can constitute an alternative making it possible to question patriarchy and capitalist neoliberalism under certain conditions. Four factors are fundamental to avoid the emergence of new forms of domination in the practice of the commons: 1) the exchange of knowledge; 2) ecological responsibility, 3) decentralized power and 4) interdependence between social justice and ecology.

Some publications focus on care work as having a vocation to become a common, in order to transform the market economy from a feminist perspective. It is a question of jointly fighting against capitalism and patriarchy, which are considered to be two systems linked to each other. Federici (2011), whose work is in a Marxist feminist frame, relies on the commons to propose a way out of the market economy, in particular to modify the role of care work within societies. The aim is to change the foundation on which society is based, namely the gendered division of labor and the non-recognition of care work. It clarifies the conditions under which the commons can become a horizon for overcoming capitalism (Caffentzis et Federici 2014). She draws attention to the fact that the commons must not become a means of providing reproduction labor at low cost. In the same vein, Dengler et Lang (2022) study how to organize care work in a degrowth society that combines social justice and ecology without prioritizing environmental justice over gender equality. By mobilizing the grid of the commons, the authors propose to decommodify care work. By going beyond the public sphere/private sphere dichotomy, the aim is to consider care as a common ("commonization of care"), relying on a transformative community as it exists at the margins of capitalism and then create by social movements. social all over the world. In the same vein, Sciannamblo et al. (2021) combine the concepts of commoning and caring and show how this constitutes an alternative to capitalism.

Finally, Federici (2011) discuss the feminist critic addressed to the reform of land ownership in Africa implemented by the World Bank in the 1990s that aimed at developing communal lands. They showed that before this reform, landless women living in urban areas appropriated unused public land to access subsistence agriculture. This was not possible after the reform was implemented. Federici takes a mixed look at this feminist critic of communal lands, she denounces an individualist drift playing that reinforce neoliberalism. This reclamation of unused public lands should have paved the way for the creation of new commons.

### 5.2.2 Articulation with the analytical approach

Some works based on case studies of the commons lead to relativize the feminist view of the commons built on traditions. Agarwal denounces the idealization of the traditional management of resources by the commons that certain branches of ecofeminism defend. Indeed, rules and governance are often based on patriarchal practices that exclude women, especially those from the most precarious lower castes. For ecofeminism, Agarwal substituted what she calls an environmentalist feminism which emphasizes the materiality of human relations and oppressions (Agarwal 1992). She also shows that the revival of the commons, particularly through the development of communal management systems (for example Joint Forest management) has led to the transition from a system of access to resources through citizenship (belonging to the village) to a membership system (club membership). These new modes of management inspired by the commons have been designed without taking into account gender and class domination relations, thus giving more power to men. The poorest women have been excluded from accessing and managing these resources (Agarwal 1997). Similarly, Carney (1993) shows that the change in the management of swamps in The Gambia following agrarian reform increased conflicts between women and men, the latter then having the possibility of enclosing the land and thus taking control of the land and of women's domestic work.
# 6 Conclusion

The literature associating gender perspective and reflection on the commons is not new and heterogeneous. This double field should be extended, because this articulation is particularly fruitful for understanding the mechanisms of oppression, subjugation and gender inequalities. The bibliometric analysis is based on a double anchoring of this literature in an academic and analytical perspective and in a normative or activism or political fight perspective. We thus identify four areas of reflection around gender and the commons. The double field of gender and commons is particularly associated with multidisciplinarity, as well as with various collaborations. Research in gender or feminist studies cross those on the commons on themes related to the environment, the preservation of resources and those related to economic development. Controversies emerge within this dual field (for example around the different types of ecofeminisms). Research in the double fields show that the commons are not exempt from forms of oppression (at the household or the community level), so special attention to the gender perspective is necessary. This must be combined with other forms of domination or inequality, such as social or ethnic origin, or even sexual orientation. To date, the research agenda remains open: more empirical work is required to understand the processes of composition of hierarchies within the commons as well as the modes of resistance on the part of oppressed groups. It should be noted that this state of the literature should be supplemented with new entries to better document the part due to researchers from the Global South.

Without claiming to be exhaustive, this paper demonstrates more generally the fruitfulness of a cross-sectional approach of gender and the commons to address the issues associated with the major transitions that societies face. The environmental transition requires a transformation of the dominant resource management methods. The demographic transitions linked to aging requires care for dependent people in various cultural contexts and underlines the importance of the resource, susceptible to commoning, that is care. The digital transition through the commodification of personal data radically transforms the boundaries between public and private while reproducing, on the scale of artificial intelligence, the categories and hierarchies linked to gender and other factors of discrimination.

# 7 Appendix

## 7.1 The Genre&Com database

The Genre&Com database was created on Excel and the processing of information, the construction of variables were carried out with R. For each article or document retained, several pieces of information were coded in order to analyze the contents of this corpus and better understand the different ways of articulating the gender perspective and that of the commons. The variables available in Genre&Com are the following:

* author: this variable provides the name and first name of the author. The same document can be associated with several authors in case of co-authoring and an author can have written several articles or documents.

* sex: this variable provides information on the sex of authors, this information is based on the information available online by combining information from the first name, possibly photos and texts describing the course of the person. More often, this information is available on personal or professional page. The variable "sex" can take the values "F" or "H", he/him/his corresponds to "M" and "she/her/hers to"F"; no cases of non-binary or explicitly transgender people were identified.
*   **field_author:** this variable indicates the author's main discipline(s). This information comes from the affiliation when it is explicit in the paper or from a specific research on the web. The same person can be associated with several disciplinary fields. This is all the more important to take into account since the field of research in gender studies or that of the commons are both often multidisciplinary, even transdisciplinary. The coding of this variable raises the problem of multiple designations and disciplinary breakdown according to country. In order to reduce the number of disciplines, we proceeded to a grouping as follows:

*   **Sociology** includes *social research, social sciences, sociology, social studies* and *social policy*.

*   **Environmental studies** includes *school of earth and environment, biology, environmental studies/sciences, environment and development policy, development and biotechnology, biology, biodiversity international, ecology and sustainability*.

*   **Rural studies** includes *nomadic pastoralism studies, department of forest and rangeland, rangeland ecosystem science, pastoralist sciences, agricultural sciences, land and water management, forestry and international relations and rural development*.

*   **Political science** includes *political science, public policies, political sciences, political ecology*.

*   **Regional/cultural studies** includes *asian studies, african studies, postcolonial studies, global studies, latin american studies, bhutan studies, cultural studies*.

*   **Engineering** includes *applied information technology, technology, engineering*.

*   **Economics** includes *statistics, economics, management, development studies and planning and regional development, business, ecological economics, finance*.

*   **Geography/urban studies** includes *urban planning, geology, architecture, geography, urban studies*.

*   **Gender studies** includes *women and politics and gender studies*.

*   **country_author:** this is the country in which the institution to which the author is affiliated is located. It is not the nationality or the geographical origin of the person but that of the institution to which they are attached, as this affiliation can change over time for the same individual.

*   **publication_title, yearpub, vol, issue:** these variables respectively inform the title of the journal, the year of publication of the document, the volume and the number if applicable.

*   **title and key_words:** these variables provide the title of the article and the associated keywords when they exist.

*   **cited_by:** this variable provides the number of citations of the document as mentioned in Google Scholar. A publication's citation count is likely to increase over time. The Genre&Com database contains this information as it was available in October 2022.

*   **region-commons and country-commons:** these variables give the continent and the country, when it is mentioned, in which the resource or management in the form of commons of this resource studied in the article is located. When several regions or countries are concerned, they are all mentioned.

*   **type_commons:** this variable informs, when relevant, the type of resources or sometimes the service with which the studied common is associated (land, forest, water, irrigation, etc.). In order to reduce the number of resources or services mentioned, we have grouped them as follows:

*   the category *irrigation/water* includes the irrigation service and the water resource.
## 7.3 Coding the analytical grid

In order to analyze the literature based on the reading grid proposed in the previous section, each document in the Genre&Com database was tagged based on the information available in the summary.

With regard to gender, two approaches have been distinguished:

* either a “gender” approach that highlights the power relations of domination at work within a community, the management of a resource, the decision-making process, access to the resource, etc. It is then a question of describing the inequalities. This tag also applies to analyzes that show, on the contrary, the fact that the commons constitute a mode of resource management that promotes the emancipation of women in certain contexts.

* or a “feminist” approach, which aims to promote gender equality as an objective to be achieved. The explicit normative perspective denounces a system of patriarchal domination and proposes paths for feminist transformations with which the commons are associated. Papers adopting an ecofeminist perspective are identified by this tag, but the latter identifies other types of approaches.

The tag\_gender makes it possible to identify the two types of approach. It was constructed by identifying the following key words in the summaries of each document:

* feminism/feminist/féministe/féminisme, ecofeminism/ecofeminist, patriarchal/patriarchy for the label “feminist”

* by default, the other documents have been tagged with the label “gender”.

With regard to the commons, in accordance with the analysis grid, two approaches are distinguished:

* either an applied and analytical approach aimed at describing the functioning of the commons or a common based on case studies, by raising the issues associated with them, in this case the tag is case;

* or a political and more often theoretical approach that considers the commons as a way of doing society. It is then a question of developing the use of the commons as an alternative to the market economy or statism. We qualify this approach as a grid, namely a reading grid that promotes a society thought of as more egalitarian and fairer than that dominated by the market and private property and which is not based on the appropriation of resources by the State.

The tag\_commons identifies the type of approach to commons. It was constructed by identifying the following keywords in the summaries of each article:

* struggles, dispossession, social movement, oppression, neoliberalism, consumerism, Marxism/Marx, materialism, individualism, transformative, anti-capitalism/anti-capitalist/capitalism/capitalist class, global South, decolonization, liberal, climate justice/justice, degrowth/decommodification/commonization, exploitation, social change, citizenship, activist, new initiative, domination, social common for the label “grid” that corresponds to the political perspective.

* by default, the other documents have been tagged with the label “case” corresponding to the analytical perspective.
Bibliography

Agarwal, Bina. 1992. « 1The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India ». *Feminist studies* 18: 119-58.

———. 1997. « Environmental Action, Gender Equity and Women's Participation ». *Development and Change* 28 (1): 1-44. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-7660.00033.

———. 2009. « Rule Making in Community Forestry Institutions: The Difference Women Make ». *Ecological Economics* 68 (8-9): 2296-2308. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2009.02.017.

Agrawal, Arun, et Clark C Gibson. 1999. « Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Role of Community in Natural Resource Conservation ». *World Development* 27 (4): 629-49. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-750X(98)00161-2.

Boyle, James. 2003. « The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain ». *Law and Contemporary Problems* 66: 42.

Buchanan, James M. 1965. « An Economic Theory of Clubs », 15.

Caffentzis, Georges, et Sylvia Federici. 2014. « Commons Against and Beyond Capitalism ». *Community Development Journal* 49 (suppl 1): i92-105. https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsu006.

Carney, Judith. 1993. « Converting the Wetlands, Engendering the Environment: The Intersection of Gender with Agrarian Change in the Gambia », 21.

Coriat, Benjamin. 2017. « Communs (approche économique) ». In, Cornu, Marie, Orsi, Fabienne & Rochfeld, Judith (dir.), Dictionnaires Quadrige. Paris: PUF.

D'Eaubonne, Françoise. 2018. *Écologie et féminisme: révolution ou mutation ? Nouvelle éd. Paris: Libre & solidaire.*

Dardot, Pierre, et Christian Laval. 2014. *Commun: essai sur la révolution au XXIe siècle*. Paris: La Déécouverte.

Dengler, Corinna, et Miriam Lang. 2022. « Commoning Care: Feminist Degrowth Visions for a Socio-Ecological Transformation ». *Feminist Economics* 28 (1): 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2021.1942511.

Dietze, Gabriele. 2014. « Decolonizing Gender – Gendering Decolonial Theory. Crosscurrents and Archaeologies ». In.

Doss, Cheryl, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Audrey Pereira, et Rajendra Pradhan. 2020. « Women's Empowerment, Extended Families and Male Migration in Nepal ». *FPRI Discussion Paper*, n° 1977: 41.

Federici, Silvia. 2011. *WorkingUSA* 14 (1): 41-56. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1743-4580.2010.00319.x.

Fontaine, Geneviève. 2021. « Les communs de capabilités : une analyse des Pôles Territoriaux de Coopération Economique à partir du croisement des approches d'Ostrom et de Sen ». https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02422361/.

Fraisse, Geneviève. 2022. *La fabrique du féminisme*. [Edition revue et augmentée d'un avant-propos de l'autrice, 2012 1ere ed.]. Lorient: Le Passager clandestin.

Fraser, Nancy. 2010. « Marchandisation, protection sociale et émancipation ». *Revue de l'OFCE* 114 (3): 11-28. https://www.cairn.info/revue-de-l-ofce-2010-3-page-11.htm.

Hardin, Garrett. 1968. « The Tragedy of the Commons: The Population Problem Has No Technical Solution; It Requires a Fundamental Extension in Morality. » *Science* 162 (3859): 1243-48. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243.

Harding, Sandra G. 1991. *Whose science? Whose knowledge? thinking from women's lives*. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.

Heller, Michael A, et Rebecca S Eisenberg. 1998. « Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research » 280: 4.

Jourdain, Édouard. 2021. *Les communs*. Paris: Que sais-je.

Kashwan, Prakash, Praneeta Mudaliar, Sheila R. Foster, et Floriane Clement. 2021. « Reimagining and Governing the Commons in an Unequal World: A Critical Engagement ». *Current Research in Environmental Sustainability* 3: 100102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crsust.2021.100102.
Laerhoven, Frank van, Michael Schoon, et Sergio Villamayor-Tomas. 2020. « Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of Ostrom's *Governing the Commons*: Traditions and Trends in the Study of the Commons, Revisited ». *International Journal of the Commons* 14 (1): 208224. https://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.1030.

Łapniewska, Zofia. 2016. « Reading Elinor Ostrom Through a Gender Perspective ». *Feminist Economics* 22 (4): 129-51. https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2016.1171376.

Levien, Michael. 2017. « Gender and Land Dispossession: A Comparative Analysis ». *The Journal of Peasant Studies* 44 (6): 1111-34. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2017.1367291.

Leyronas, Stéphanie, et Tamatoa Bambridge. 2018. « Communs et développement : une approche renouvelée face aux défis mondiaux ». *Revue internationale des études du développement* 233 (1): 11-29. https://www.cairn.info/revue-internationale-des-etudes-du-developpement-2018-1-page-11.htm.

Lutz, Helma, Maria Teresa Herrera Vivar, et Linda Supik. 2016. *Framing intersectionality: debates on a multi-faceted concept in gender studies*. London: Routledge.

May, Ann Mari, et Gale Summerfield. 2012a. « Creating a Space Where Gender Matters: Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) Talks with Ann Mari May and Gale Summerfield ». *Feminist Economics* 18 (4): 25-37. https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2012.739725.

———. 2012b. « Creating a Space Where Gender Matters: Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) Talks with Ann Mari May and Gale Summerfield ». *Feminist Economics* 18 (4): 25-37. https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2012.739725.

Medie, Peace A., et Alice J. Kang. 2018. « Power, knowledge and the politics of gender in the Global South ». *European Journal of Politics and Gender* 1 (1-2): 37-54. https://doi.org/10.1332/251510818X15272520831157.

Meinzen-Dick, Ruth, et Margreet Zwarteveen. 1998. « Gendered participation in water management: Issues and illustrations from water users' associations in South Asia ». *Agriculture and Human Values* 15 (4): 337-45. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007533018254.

Milani, Bruna Farine. 2021. « Commoning in Urban Gardens in Brussels, an Ecofeminist approach to the Urban Commons ». https://urbanstudies.brussels/sites/default/files/2021-09/2021_Farine%20Milani.pdf.

Nussbaum, Martha C. 1997. « Capabilities and Human Rights ». *Fordham Law Review* 66 (2): 30.

Ostrom, Elinor. 1999. « Coping with Tragedies of the Commons ». *Annual Review of Political Science* 2 (1): 493-535. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.2.1.493.

———. 2008. « Developing a Method for Analyzing Institutional Change ». In, Sandra Batie and Nicholas Mercuro (dir.), 57. London: Routledge.

Périvier, Hélène. 2020. *L'économie féministe: pourquoi la science économique a besoin du féminisme et vice versa*. Les Presses de Sciences Po. Paris.

Perkins, Patricia E. (Ellie). 2019. « Climate Justice, Commons, and Degrowth ». *Ecological Economics* 160: 183-90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.02.005.

Pochic, Sophie. 2018. « 2 - Féminisme de marché et égalité élitiste ? » In, 42-52. Recherches. Paris: La Découverte. https://doi.org/10.3917/dec.maru.2018.01.0042.

Podlashuc, Leo. 2009. « Saving Women: Saving the Commons ». In, Pluto Press and Spinifex Press, 372-95. In Ariel Salleh (Dir.). Londres.

Rap, Edwin, et Martina Sherin Jaskolski. 2019. « The Lives of Women in a Land Reclamation Project: Gender, Class, Culture and Place in Egyptian Land and Water Management ». *International Journal of the Commons* 13 (1): 84. https://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.919.

Revollo-Fernández, Daniel, Alonso Aguilar-Ibarra, Fiorenza Micheli, et Andrea Sáenz-Arroyo. 2016. « Exploring the Role of Gender in Common-Pool Resource Extraction: Evidence from Laboratory and Field Experiments in Fisheries ». *Applied Economics Letters* 23 (13): 912-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504851.2015.1119786.

Samuelson, Paul A. 1954. « The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure ». *The Review of Economics and Statistics* 36 (4): 387. https://doi.org/10.2307/1925895.
Sciannamblo, Mariacristina, Marisa Leavitt Cohn, Peter Lyle, et Maurizio Teli. 2021. « Caring and Commoning as Cooperative Work: A Case Study in Europe ». *Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction* 5 (CSCW1): 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449200.

Sen, Amartya. 2005. « Human Rights and Capabilities ». *Journal of Human Development* 6 (2): 151-66. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649880500120491.

Shiva, Vandana. 2020. *Reclaiming the commons: biodiversity, indigenous knowledge, and the rights of Mother Earth*. New edition. Santa Fe: Synergetic Press.

Suna, Y., E. Mwangi, et R. Meinzen-Dick. 2011. « Is Gender an Important Factor Influencing User Groups’ Property Rights and Forestry Governance? Empirical Analysis from East Africa and Latin America ». *International Forestry Review* 13 (2): 205-19. https://doi.org/10.1505/146554811797406598.

Zwarteveen, Margreet Z. 1997. « Water: From Basic Need to Commodity: A Discussion on Gender and Water Rights in the Context of Irrigation ». *World Development* 25 (8): 1335-49. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-750X(97)00032-6.
## ABOUT OFCE

The Paris-based Observatoire français des conjonctures économiques (OFCE), or French Economic Observatory is an independent and publicly-funded centre whose activities focus on economic research, forecasting and the evaluation of public policy.

Its 1981 founding charter established it as part of the French Fondation nationale des sciences politiques (Sciences Po), and gave it the mission to “ensure that the fruits of scientific rigour and academic independence serve the public debate about the economy”. The OFCE fulfils this mission by conducting theoretical and empirical studies, taking part in international scientific networks, and assuring a regular presence in the media through close cooperation with the French and European public authorities. The work of the OFCE covers most fields of economic analysis, from macroeconomics, growth, social welfare programmes, taxation and employment policy to sustainable development, competition, innovation and regulatory affairs.

## ABOUT SCIENCES PO

Sciences Po is an institution of higher education and research in the humanities and social sciences. Its work in law, economics, history, political science and sociology is pursued through ten research units and several crosscutting programmes.

Its research community includes over two hundred twenty members and three hundred fifty PhD candidates. Recognized internationally, their work covers a wide range of topics including education, democracies, urban development, globalization and public health.

One of Sciences Po's key objectives is to make a significant contribution to methodological, epistemological and theoretical advances in the humanities and social sciences. Sciences Po's mission is also to share the results of its research with the international research community, students, and more broadly, society as a whole.

## PARTNERSHIP