Commoning as a Strategy for HCI Research and Design in South Asia

Commons emerge and are reclaimed through collective, shared, and self-organized practices known as commoning. Despite their historical embeddedness in South Asian communities, commoning practices have succumbed to enclosure and destruction due to region-wide privatization and development schemes implemented over the past century. Certain HCI and ICTD research has critiqued such schemes for undermining community autonomy and well-being. To advance the development of alternative models, we conducted a literature review of HCI research involving the commons, considering both natural and digital resources, in South Asia. Additionally, we examine the social practices, rules, and institutional arrangements described in the corpus through the lens of Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for commons governance. Based on our findings, we formulate a commoning framework by synthesizing three areas of HCI research — infrastructuring, participatory design, and assets-based design — proposing it as an alternative to neoliberal development paradigms for future HCI research.