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Public Participation in Community Forest Policy in Thailand: The Influence of Academics as Brokers
(2003) Zurcher, Sacha
"This paper focuses on the role of networks in enhancing public participation in community forestry policy in Thailand. It analyses how conflicts between the state and local people over the right to manage forest resources have ceased to be seen as isolated incidents, but as part of a structural shortcoming in the law. In so doing it discusses the appearance of networks of actors who question the effectiveness of state control, and lobby for formal frameworks to establish the rights of local people in regards to access and control over forest resources. The paper analyses how the different actors became involved, and what their influence was in the process of drafting and presenting a people's version of a community forest bill to Parliament in 2000. Results show that conflicts over access rights to forest resources at the local level would not have had widespread national attention, was it not for a group of academics who supported the idea of local management. They became actively involved in the drafting process of the community forest bill, and could effectively lift a formerly local issue to a national level by using the press to publicize their academic achievements. Academics, non-governmental organizations, and peoples organizations strategically allied themselves with those actors within the state apparatus who had the same opinion. In so doing they attempted to acquire a broader support for legalizing the community forestry bill."
Reclaiming the Commons: A Discourse for New Politics. How Grassroots Activists are Shaping the Future
(2014) Ball, Sophie
"This thesis draws together a number of examples of activism and protest in order to shine a light on some of the discourses and practices that have emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries that offer alternatives to the neoliberal discourse. I make the case for the political significance of the activists who have been a force for change that has been largely overlooked – until 2011, the year which saw a series of protests take place across a large part of the globe: ‘the year politics changed’. I present this argument through what I call the story of the commons, and assert that this narrative is evidence of a vision that has arisen piecemeal, and largely from grassroots levels. The examples of discourse and practice that this thesis explores illustrate both the emergence of the language of the commons from many different spheres of life and also its influence across a range of fields. The analysis includes a historical overview of the commons, while focusing on the evolution of the concept from the latter half of the 20th century to the present day, with the most recent material taken from events occurring in 2012. Through this vision, we recognise what is lost through the hegemony of ongoing capitalist appropriation, accumulation and exploitation of all aspects of life and reassert rights over - reclaim - that which has been lost. Through the struggle of all those involved in reclaiming the commons, a discourse for new politics emerges and shapes the future. This thesis demonstrates the emergence of a new discourse of the commons that makes possible a reconceptualisation of social, economic and political spaces."
The State of Copyright Activism
(2004) Vaidhyanathan, Siva
"One of the great hopes I had while I researched and wrote Copyrights and Copywrongs (New York: New York University Press, 2001), a cultural history of American copyright, during the late 1990s was that copyright debates might puncture the bubble of public consciousness and become important global policy questions. My wish has come true. Since 1998 questions about whether the United States has constructed an equitable or effective copyright system frequently appear on the pages of daily newspapers. Activist movements for both stronger and looser copyright systems have grown in volume and furor. And the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in early 2003 that the foundations of American copyright, as expressed in the Constitution, are barely relevant in an age in which both media companies and clever consumers enjoy unprecedented power over the use of works."

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Browsing DLC by Subject "activism"