INTRODUCTION

The extractivist model of natural resource management that fuels our economies has severely contributed to the environmental and biodiversity crisis (IPBES 2019). This model, based on private property and individual capital accumulation, has enclosed the material and immaterial resources that sustain life (Nieto-Romero et al. 2019) and reduced citizens to passive consumers, exploiting both nature and human beings in the name of efficiency. Community-based forms of resource management, such as commons, challenge the dominant techno-bureaucratic model of natural resources management, and advocate for a more equitable and sustainable approach (Nieto-Romero et al. 2019). Historical commons evolved at the local level since the Middle Ages into self-governing institutions of collective land property, mostly in rural and mountain areas (Greco 2014), to manage resources they depended on for their livelihoods (De Moor 2011). As communities in Europe have become less directly dependent on natural resources and have developed centralized forms of administration, institutionalized commons have assumed a technocratic role in managing forests and meadows and have become less influential on communities’ everyday life (Skulska et al. 2020). In recent years, a growing body of literature is focusing on commoning, i.e., the process by which humans relate to each other and other non-humans to negotiate and self-organize the access, use, benefit, care, and responsibility for tangible (e.g., land) and intangible resources (e.g., culture) that they consider important to address their needs and desires (Bollier 2016, Gibson-Graham et al. 2016, Euler 2018). Commoning processes have an inherent potential to overcome or at least mitigate the extractivist model reducing citizens to passive consumers. In fact, commoning can provide tangible examples of a collective approach to prosumption, where consumers (i.e., co-prosumers) actively participate in value creation by creating products (Ritzel et al. 2022). They are also exemplars of a relational approach to natural resource management, one that fosters “more dynamic, holistic accounts of human-nature connectedness; more situated and diverse knowledges for decision-making; and new domains and methods of intervention that nurture relationships in place and practice” (West et al. 2020:304). A relational approach is further exemplified in commoning initiatives’ commitment to care, where membership is defined according to the willingness to respect and negotiate the appropriate use of resources for their collective material and cultural survival (Nieto-Romero et al. 2019). Considering these characteristics, commoning processes can expand our understanding of how to nurture and reinforce the importance of biodiversity and ecosystems for human well-being (Tengö et al. 2017). As such, they can be understood as local knowledge systems that provide insights and solutions that extend beyond their immediate context and can contribute to broader systemic change, resisting the dominant ideas of nature, society, and the economy, and showing practical alternatives to tackle the current polycrisis (Helfrich and Bollier 2019).

Despite the growing recognition of commoning as an innovative process that seeks to support a greater participatory control over shared resources and community life (Bollier 2016), many commoning initiatives remain marginalized from mainstream society. They particularly lack visibility and influence in decision-making processes relating to natural resource management. They may operate in isolation and in precarious conditions (Pandey et al. 2024). To address this conundrum, commoning initiatives must increase visibility, foster collaboration with other initiatives, and strengthen their capacity to influence change (Nieto-Romero et al. 2019, Pandey et al. 2024).

Against this background, the sustainability science community is increasingly recognizing the need for science to challenge dominant structures and cultural hegemonies, and to systematize knowledge that highlights and supports marginalized perspectives, such as commoning practices, and that involves plural ways of knowing and relating to the world (Turnhout 2024). Transformative science approaches, such as transdisciplinarity, are essential for achieving these goals. Transdisciplinary (TD) science has been defined as a “reflexive collaborative research approach that integrates knowledge and perspectives from different disciplines and stakeholders; it facilitates mutual learning processes and aims to contribute to solutions for complex real-world problems” (Zscheischler et al. 2018:1063). The literature associates a number of benefits to TD processes, such as trust in others, greater capacity for reflexivity, network building, sense of belonging, and creation and distribution of knowledge that can be applied to participants’ real world (Fazey et al. 2018, Tobias et al. 2019). For these characteristics, transdisciplinary approaches can contribute to increase visibility of commoning initiatives, by providing a sound conceptual and ethical foundation to challenge dominant structures perpetuating capitalist and colonialist forms of exploitation. Transdisciplinarity also resonates with another aspect key to commoning, i.e., the great importance attributed to human-nature relationships, grounded in places and communities. Along with Tschakert, our work is therefore informed by the notion that transdisciplinarity can provide pathways to produce actionable knowledge that is “place-based, integrative, reflexive, and reflective of different value systems, political agendas, and non-human needs and actors.” (Tschakert et al. 2016:20). Leveraging arts and culture can strengthen these goals, as illustrated by recent scholarship in transdisciplinary and transformative sustainability science (Heras and Tàbara 2014, Pearson et al. 2018).

Inspired by all of the above, we focus on a transdisciplinary process where our group of researchers involved a diversity of commoning initiatives in the shared endeavor of co-creating a rural festival on commoning. Festivals can be defined as temporary, liminal, intensive experiences that have the potential to generate spaces to create or re-appropriate, perform, and embody narratives and symbols of belonging, leading to the public expression of new collective identities and claims from marginalized voices, fostering collective action (Picard 2016, Perry et al. 2020). Festivals are promising venues to elevate plural ways of knowing and valorize local knowledge systems, as they forge connections between people and places through affective, embodied, and playful experiences (Edensor 2012). Festivals require the involvement of a broad range of stakeholders with unique expertise, including stakeholders coming from the cultural, sports, culinary, and crafts sectors. Research shows that, in TD collaborations, these stakeholders are typically relegated to the role of service providers, participating only in specific, short-term engagements (Belfiore 2022). Such limited involvement can exacerbate the precariousness of these sectors because their contributions are not integrated into the structural framework of the transdisciplinary process. Engaging stakeholders from the beginning, particularly during the co-design phase of the co-creation process (Hakkarainen et al. 2022), is both crucial and promising. Co-design can substantially improve the knowledge co-production process, as it allows researchers and non-academic partners to develop the project jointly, and to define collaboratively the issues at stake, so that they meet their collective interests and needs (Moser 2016). For co-design to happen, it is essential to establish an early collaboration with stakeholders, allowing their insights and experiences to shape the co-creation process meaningfully (Lang et al. 2012).

In this paper we aim to investigate the potentials and challenges of early transdisciplinary collaboration in enabling a meaningful co-creation process of the festival. In particular, we wish to highlight the factors that enabled the collaboration, including the value of early co-design and the innovative conceptual and methodological approaches that allowed us to overcome the typical obstacles of transdisciplinary collaborations. We aim to reflect on the effectiveness of the festival in building knowledge and capacities with and for commoning practices. We also wish to address the limitations and challenges of this type of transdisciplinary collaboration, and possible future implications for transformative sustainability science.

From the outset, the project was conceived in close collaboration with a cohort of professionals including architects, designers, members of cultural and sports associations, educators, farmers, facilitators, and artists. The festival had two main goals. First, to make visible and connect diverse commoning practices operating in three mountainous rural valleys of the Italian North-Eastern Alps. Second, it was meant to foster a sense of collective care for the place, and its human and non-human beings and elements, using art and design as common language. The COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, which occurred during the festival co-design phase impeding any in-person activities, emphasized the importance of these goals, as people experienced isolation and vulnerability.

BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE

Our case study took place in the mountainous rural areas of Trento Province in Northeastern Italy, specifically the Giudicarie, Vallagarina, and Terragnolo valleys. Over the past decades, intensified agriculture and mass tourism in Trento province have significantly influenced human interactions with agroecological systems in the region (Caraveli 2000, Salvati and Carlucci 2011). These trends have been reinforced by current policies and funding mechanisms, particularly under the Common Agricultural Policy, which drive population and production toward already intensive areas (Caraveli 2000). As a consequence, rural zones designated as inner areas experience cycles of depopulation and economic marginalization (ISTAT 2024). This structural imbalance creates vulnerabilities, by increasing dependence on external systems for knowledge, technology, inputs, and outputs (Petersen-Rockney et al. 2021). Furthermore, it marginalizes bottom-up initiatives that do not conform to dominant productive frameworks, limiting alternative approaches to local development (Caffentzis and Federici 2014).

People in these areas have collectively organized to address needs through creative social innovation initiatives that valorize local resources. Following Nieto-Romero et al. (2019), we refer to these practices of collective care as commoning practices. This concept describes collective organization around commoning initiatives (CIs) that share resources, foster cooperative activities, and shape discourses and relationships. Although resources, discourses, and relationships may vary among CIs, they all share a foundation in reciprocity and interconnectedness. This approach creates an economy that serves community needs and engages in ethical care to negotiate coexistence with other living beings (Gibson-Graham 2008, Nieto-Romero et al. 2019, Moriggi et al. 2020).

Four co-authors of this article have conducted ongoing research on commoning practices since 2019. Our research revealed limited knowledge of commoning as a dynamic process in the case study area, and a dominant narrative of “deprived places,” despite their rich natural and human resources (Pandey et al. 2024). Moreover, we observed that relational practices remained marginalized in natural resource management decision making. The COVID-19 pandemic further highlighted the limitations of the dominant economic model and created a sense of urgency among local communities to increase the visibility of collective care practices. Against this backdrop, building on the legacy of place-based research, we aimed to valorize the context of study by integrating “universal knowledge with knowledge particular to the social, ecological, and historical circumstances of actual places” (Gollagher and Hartz-Karp 2013:2346). In other words, we used theoretical concepts such as relationality, care, and commoning to connect diverse place-based practices; this allowed us to have a common language and framing, and foster a critical mass around collective ways of caring for the territory. In this sense, we proposed the concept of commoning practice as an umbrella term for all the initiatives involved.

As a multidisciplinary group of researchers in landscape architecture, eco-social design, and social innovation, in 2020 we conceived and proposed the idea of organizing a festival on collective practices of care in and with the three valleys of Giudicarie, Vallagarina, and Terragnolo. Since its inception, this effort was discussed and coordinated with our initial contacts in the study sites, who responded with interest and commitment in co-creating such a project.

The CIs we engaged are detailed in Table 1. They represent a diversity of commoning processes, including reusing landscape and architectural elements, regenerating local seeds, and producing healthy food and drinks. They also included a barrier-free eco-friendly climbing area. These activities created socializing moments while raising awareness of more-than-human care and circular economy. In addition to the CIs, the co-creation team included other stakeholders, as we explain below.

METHODS

Methodological approach

Our methodological approach is grounded in transdisciplinary research, with its emphasis on problem-solving, transcending disciplines, and transgressing reductionist and mechanistic worldviews (Klein 2014). We also drew inspiration from other bodies of literature, which fall under the umbrella of action-oriented and mode-2 science approaches to knowledge production (Fazey et al. 2018). We incorporated conceptual and methodological ingredients from Participatory Action Research (PAR), care-inspired feminist epistemologies, and design thinking.

We adopted the inquiry-oriented approach of PAR, which seeks to connect practices and ideas to promote human flourishing in particular places and contexts. PAR’s characteristics, as defined by Reason and Bradbury (2008), align with our initial intentions for the transdisciplinary collaboration, namely, to find creative responses to practical challenges; open new communicative spaces for dialogue and collaboration; draw on diverse ways of knowing; imbue research with values in line with individuals, communities, and the wider ecology; and be open to the emergent and interactive process that evolves through collective engagement. PAR should lead not only to practical knowledge, but also to new abilities to create knowledge, thus empowering participants with new capacities, and to a new politics of knowledge, by making visible those taken-for-granted processes that science alone might overlook or dismiss (Borda 2006, Reason and Bradbury 2008).

Ethics of care principles were also woven into the fabric of the collaborative activities. This included attentiveness to the context and to the needs of participants, responsiveness in addressing those needs, and reciprocity through mutual learning and giving back to the communities involved (Moriggi 2021, Staffa et al. 2022). Care-inspired feminist epistemologies were also in line with the festival’s objectives, namely to (a) make visible and connect commoning practices; and (b) create a sense of collective care for community and place (Gibson-Graham 2008).

Finally, we were influenced by design thinking, which is a needs-based approach grounded in iterative learning and co-creation. Design thinking emphasizes “reflection-in-action” and the creation of aesthetic artefacts, visual elements, and material objects that serve as boundary objects. These boundary objects appeal to all senses, are rich in meaning, and provide a common language that bridges disciplinary silos (Maher et al. 2018, Pearson et al. 2018).

The process of co-creating the festival

We structured the festival co-creation process based on the ideal-type transdisciplinary (TD) framework as conceptualized by Lang et al. (2012). The first phase of the festival co-design aligns with what the literature refers to as problem-framing and team building. The second phase, festival co-production, corresponds to the co-production of solution-oriented knowledge. Finally, the third phase, the harvesting of the festival’s outcomes, aligns with the reintegration and application of the knowledge created.

The visual in Figure 1 outlines the time line for the three phases of the project. The co-design phase took place from July 2020 to May 2021. The festival itself (i.e., co-production) occurred over three weekends (i.e., festival stops) in the three selected festival sites, between late May and mid-June 2021. Finally, the harvesting phase spanned from June to September 2021.

Festival co-design

The festival co-design process involved various activities. We began by conducting initial scoping visits (July 2020) to identify potential collaborators among existing commoning initiatives in the three rural valleys. The visits aimed to assess their interest in co-creating a festival focused on collective care. We also sought to gather insights into local needs and challenges to foster joint problem framing and co-ownership of the process. We formed a core group to design the festival and held a series of online meetings (July–September 2020). The core group included one initiative from each valley and Camposaz, a cultural organization engaged in participatory architecture (PA), which oversaw the coordination with us researchers from the beginning. We also secured funding during this phase, both monetary and in-kind support. Once the basic activities of the festival were agreed upon, the core group decided to enlarge the co-design team, by inviting other commoning initiatives and other stakeholders with various expertise (i.e., culinary, cultural, artistic, mountaineering, etc.) needed to co-create a festival. In November 2020, we held an initial online meeting with approximately 25 stakeholders. We then divided the group into three local organizing committees (LoCs), co-designing each festival stop. Although most meetings were held online, we also conducted in-person planning visits from April to May 2021 to test and discuss proposed formats and settings for the festival.

During the festival’s co-design, we collaborated with Master’s students from the program in eco-social design, University of Bolzano, who were required to work on a real-world assignment related to care. Once we co-defined activities and budget, the students designed their own project focused on creating formats and design objects that promoted exchange, creativity, reciprocity, and inclusion, gathering visual inputs from the landscape.

As we progressed in designing the festival’s activities and locations, the design phase naturally transitioned into planning. The planning phase focused on practical preparations, including taking care of the compliance with legal use of spaces and with COVID-19 with shared responsibilities among the 33 stakeholders actively engaged, as illustrated in Figure 2 and detailed in Appendix 1. Stakeholders included commoning initiatives, as well as other stakeholders actively involved in the LoCs, as well as stakeholders providing monetary and in-kind support.

Festival co-production

The festival took place over three Festival stops between late May and mid-June 2021 in specific venues (called festival basecamps) of three selected rural sites: Giudicarie, Vallagarina, and Terragnolo. Each stop featured a similar but adapted structure tailored to the specific site. A variety of dynamic activities were designed to engage visitors and stakeholders with commoning practices and regenerating underutilized spaces in a creative and inclusive manner. Each activity was carefully planned and executed to foster collaboration and learning. The focus was on connecting people, places, and ideas, and co-producing actionable knowledge through exchange to empower future actions. Figure 3 provides a short description of each activity, accompanied by a picture.

The festival also featured traditional moments, such as the opening and closing ceremonies, and eco-social design elements designed to create a tangible and sensorial link among activities. Examples include the raising of the yellow flag, and a welcome arch and kit at the start. A festival cocktail and playlist were co-created ad-hoc.

Harvesting of festival’s outcomes

According to the literature, the third phase of transdisciplinary research should focus on re-integrating and applying the generated knowledge (Lang et al. 2012), by providing researchers and stakeholders with targeted outputs that translate project results in a useful manner. Ideally, this phase also entails evaluating the societal and scientific impact of the transdisciplinary process. In the empirical cases presented here, the festival’s harvesting phase started with the writing and a presentation of the first draft of a manifesto, in support of rural collective practices of care, which served as a public declaration of principles and intentions aimed at promoting and advocating for these practices as a means of fostering sustainable, community-driven change. The draft was elaborated by researchers during the three Festival stops. In July 2021, roughly one month after the last Festival stop, the coordination team convened an evaluation workshop with eight representatives of CPs, seven other stakeholders including a municipality representative, students, and the four coordinators, totaling 19 participants. During the three-hour workshop, we evaluated the co-creation process and discussed how to re-integrate the generated knowledge and connections in the everyday practices of the commoning initiatives. Our researchers’ team also presented a refined version of the manifesto. As part of the harvesting phase, eco-social design students produced several outputs, including a digitized version of the common map, a video, a project report, and a journal (Faiella and Rustige 2021).

Data and reflexivity

Our research team collected data throughout the festival’s co-creation process using a mix of methods to allow for “multiple ways of seeing and hearing” (Greene 2007) and to capture the situated nature of knowledge. Our aim was to achieve a richer description of results, without creating awkward moments that disrupted the creative flow. The mix of methods was composed of participant observation, note-taking of conversations and discussions, as well as of meta-level reflections by researchers along the process, such as during scoping visits, online meetings, planning visits, festival activities in the different festival stops (e.g., walks, symposia, open exchange workshops), and evaluation workshops. We analyzed written outputs, such as theater performance transcripts, workshops’ posters, and the digitized common map, using thematic analysis. As researchers, we led the process of identifying, analyzing, and interpreting patterns of meaning (“themes”) within the qualitative data, exploring and understanding the experiences, perspectives, and meanings of participants. The main themes were identified combining both deductive and inductive approaches (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane 2006). In the deductive approach, themes emerged from the data itself, while in the inductive approach, we linked emerging themes with theoretical frameworks that aligned with those ideas. To reduce bias, we discussed the identified themes among the main authors and refined the list to focus on the most relevant issues. We further validated the findings by discussing them with stakeholders to increase rigor and minimize bias. The manifesto served as a boundary object to gather and present the identified themes formulated as guiding principles aiming to influence or inspire others (Tobias et al. 2019). This format facilitated engaged discussions with involved stakeholders without relying on academic formats that might distance participants and hinder transdisciplinary knowledge co-generation (Reason and Bradbury 2008). We used the data to enhance our reflexivity and critical thinking (Horcea-Milcu et al. 2024), and gain insights into the transdisciplinary process, its strengths, and the challenges we encountered.

To avoid over-formalization, we obtained stakeholders’ verbal consent to use anonymized data for research objectives at the beginning of each meeting. Furthermore, festival participants were required to read and sign an ethical protocol to ensure transparency, accountability, privacy, and confidentiality in data handling.

RESULTS

Evidence collected in our case study points to the significance of meaningful co-creation processes in elevating marginalized perspectives and strengthening place-based connections. We show how early co-design enhanced co-ownership, which recentered the role of people and places. Co-produced activities enabled place-based knowledge generation with real-world applications for the communities involved. Methodological innovations fostered inclusive co-creation, which in turn promoted connection and collective care.

Early co-design and co-ownership recentered the role of people and places

The early co-design phase enabled stakeholders, including those normally engaged as merely service-providers (e.g., designers and craftspeople; Belfiore 2022), to integrate their strengths, values, and visions into the festival co-creation process. As a result, the festival embodied the core mission of commoning practices: reconnecting people with the place, addressing sustainability issues, and promoting well-being. A practical example is the stakeholders’ decision on festival specific venues (i.e., basecamps) for the three rural sites. Basecamps were selected because they represented local regeneration efforts, such as a former monastery being transformed into a community cultural center in Giudicarie Valley or a reclaimed public space in Vallagarina Valley. A member of the La Foresta CI said, “We would like the festival stop in Vallagarina to take place in Cava Manica, a former copper mine and now a biodiversity-rich pond that the municipality wanted to transform into a public park, but that was never opened and was given to a local association of van owners that have their parking nearby, that use the park for private parties” (16 November 2021, kick-off meeting, notes). Throughout the festival, designers, architects, and artisans also reclaimed and revitalized neglected spaces, combining local needs with external expertise. Spatial transformation, through small architectural interventions built during the participatory architecture (PA) workshops, became a central aspect of the festival. For example, artisans of the Sassi e Non Solo CI suggested transforming a portion of a terraced meadow into a discussion arena, by building benches on the slope under a canopy tree and restoring a water tank to be used for the following edition of the international dry-wall competition held in Terragnolo. These interventions were collaboratively created under the leadership of the participatory architecture (PA) association, involving other local associations, external participants, and community members.

Early collaboration allowed stakeholders to showcase and valorize a wide range of expertise related to sustainability and well-being, from crafts to local culinary traditions to arts-based interventions. Diverse skill sets were blended into cohesive festival features. For instance, stakeholders with expertise in guiding walking tours combined the walks with a visit to commoning initiatives. CI members provided practical workshops, such as herbs gathering and bread baking, while eco-social designers created visual tools (e.g., maps) to document the collective experience. The collaborative creation of the festival’s activities fostered interaction between stakeholders and their diverse “thought-styles” (Tobias et al. 2019). By blending their varied expertise and passions into each activity rich synergies emerged, resulting in a shared sense of joint ownership. A mountaineering guide, for instance, said, “I could have never imagined that we could include so much in a walk!” (24 April 2021, planning visits, notes).

Early co-design allowed for meaningful connection to place by incorporating its key features into the festival elements. For instance, eco-social design students visited the three valleys to understand similarities, differences, and symbolic elements during a 3-day camping trip across the three valleys in March 2021, and subsequently presented their ideas to stakeholders for feedback. Attention was put into using locally sourced materials, like greenhouse ridge poles and hay, to build the main structural elements of the festival setting. The designs had to be simple, transportable, adaptable, and affordable, with a focus on recycling and sustainability (Faiella and Rustige 2021). This process enhanced creativity and showed the power of local solutions for sustainable living.

By centering commoning practices in the festival, participants learned about place-based practices often overlooked in mainstream narratives. These practices included replanting local crops, regenerating abandoned fields, and reusing discarded fruits. The participatory architecture (PA) workshops created small material infrastructures that artists and guides could utilize during festival events. For example, a band used the newly built stage in the porch of the Giudicarie monastery for the arts-based performance, and a local expert used the benches in the terraced meadow during the walk in Terragnolo. The co-creative activities made tangible the lived local knowledge embodied by commoning initiatives, their connection to place, and their centrality for rural livelihoods and well-being.

Co-produced activities enabled place-based knowledge generation with real-world application

Festival activities generated new knowledge and awareness with and about commoning processes. During the walks, members of CI shared stories about their origins, development, and challenges. Often, several members co-led the walks, prompting them to create and present a collective narrative. The process pushed them to reconcile different perspectives and experiences prior to and along the walk. As guides, stakeholders took ownership of their stories and voiced their needs and concerns (Reason and Bradbury 2008), such as lack of employment opportunities, or the need for more community meeting places and moments, or for protecting local biodiversity spots (05 June 2021, walks, notes). The walks allowed for individual and collective reflection, and for the assessment of each initiative’s current state. Some initiatives, like Fuochi nelle Malghe, conducted this reflection for the first time; others, like Terragnolo Che Conta, revisited it after years of collaboration.

The walks’ participants included residents unfamiliar with commoning initiatives. Conversations deepened understanding of collective care for community needs and connected participants to the place. Through questions, doubts, and sharing what they found most promising, these residents challenged commoning practices to view themselves from an outsider’s perspective. This led to the identification of blind spots as well as new insights. “Participatory mapping” at the end of the walks allowed participants to collectively identify common goods and related future visions. The maps showed the importance of tangible elements (e.g., water, meadows, rare trees, wildlife, and ancient crops), as well as intangible ones (e.g., biodiversity, quietness, and lack of human disturbances; 05 June 2021, Participatory Mapping). These elements revealed the crucial role of relational aspects, such as reciprocity among humans and with the environment, and traditions (Moriggi 2021). Conversations also brought up other examples of collective actions, like the collective use of land (i.e., civic use) and seed banks (05 June 2021, all walks, notes).

Additional knowledge was co-produced and enriched during the open exchange workshops held after the walks. Participants proposed discussion topics and offered novel insights into potential research and practice themes related to commoning processes. These included “reopening public spaces in an inclusive and responsible manner that considers the ecology of the place” and “normalizing mental health discussions, which remains a taboo in rural areas” (30 May 2021, open exchange workshops, poster notes). Interestingly, much of what came up during the walks aligned with the themes of the play written by Ecomuseo members in preparation for the festival. The play was titled “Think if everyone did like you, a.k.a. the defense of the commons,” highlighting common goods to be cared for collectively, such as water, energy, mountain paths, landscapes, biodiversity, and culture.

The symposia with invited researchers and practitioners as speakers and discussants were designed to facilitate informal knowledge exchange and were integrated into each festival stop. This format enabled in-depth exploration of issues related to commoning processes, such as feminist approaches to more-than-human perspectives, or architecture-informed strategies to enable collective action. The dialogue fostered the co-production of actionable insights that could directly impact the hosting communities. Moreover, this approach linked abstract and global knowledge to real-world applications (Lang et al. 2012). Symposium speakers brought examples of commoning experiences from diverse contexts, focusing on innovative practices and strategies for negotiating shared resources such as land, public spaces, and water. They explored the role of community in areas like food production and the collective enjoyment of nature and culture, as well as the relationship between commons and heritage regeneration, exemplified by dry stone walls. These discussions provided a foundation to foster critical mass and collective action around commoning practices, drawing on shared knowledge and experiences from other rural environments.

The experiential and sensory nature of the festival activities, for example, through food, music, and the tactile aspect of designed objects, allowed stakeholders to transcend rational, academic approaches and combine diverse ways of knowing and co-producing knowledge (Tengö et al. 2017). Food and drinks, during collective meals or walks, served as boundary objects that facilitated talks on sensitive issues like sustainable diets. Instead of abstract discussions about life-support systems, activities like bread making with fermented dough fostered awareness of the importance of bacteria. Art-based performances, such as DJ gigs, translated complex concepts like collaborating with more-than-humans, into meaningful experiences. For example, in the reclaimed mine, music was created to include the voices of other beings, such as the frogs chanting in the pond at dawn. These immersive activities led to novel ways of walking the talk and empowered stakeholders by highlighting the global relevance of their actions.

Finally, the festival provided an important formative experience for the eco-social design students, who were able to ideate, prototype, and test design elements as well to gather the co-produced knowledge and translate it into accessible outputs, including the video and report. Students wrote they were able to “follow a generative process, where activities intermingled, rather than adhering to a one-directional flow of tasks” (Faiella and Rustige 2021:10), showing that their collaboration in the festival co-creation helped them prioritize the design process over the design objects.

Inclusive co-creation fostered connection and collective care

The festival fostered connections among researchers, stakeholders, local inhabitants, and other participants (including online participants). These connections were built through inclusive and careful co-creation (Moriggi 2021).

The festival’s iterative design process allowed for the gradual inclusion of new stakeholders beyond the initial core team. A key factor in maintaining motivation and engagement was our assets-based approach. Stakeholders came together around positive, solution-oriented collaborative interventions rather than problem-focused abstract discussions. As stakeholders recurrently shared, “motivation comes before money. If we have motivation, we can find the means to fund the festival” (23 July 2020, scoping visits, notes). This demonstrates that participants were motivated by their shared sense of ownership rather than financial incentives. Once funding became available, it formalized the project and enabled more structured planning and compensation for those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The festival activities were designed to be inclusive and safe. A collective press conference held in a hybrid mode (i.e., both in person and online), with one representative for each LoC and the coordination team, helped increase the festival’s visibility at the regional level, and engage the wider public. In the month before the festival, people could apply to participate as speakers in symposia or builders in PA workshops, through open calls broadcasted locally and in social media, and through word of mouth of all stakeholders involved in the co-design. The program offered a diverse range of activities, including dynamic, static, practical, and intellectual options for people with varying interests and schedules. Some activities such as the opening and closing ceremonies, the symposium sessions, and the arts-based performances, were streamed online. Nearly all activities took place outdoors to ensure physical distancing and prevent the spread of COVID-19.

The co-creation process shifted the mentality from producer-consumer to a co-prosumer one (Ritzel et al. 2022). Stakeholders and participants actively engaged in a shared and diverse experience that celebrated collaboration and collective care. Open exchange workshops allowed participants to suggest themes and prompted them to identify next steps for implementing knowledge, through a final “call to action.” In PA workshops, participants collaboratively created installations with limited resources and time, and keeping in mind previously gathered community needs. This challenge fostered a sense of shared purpose. The writing and performance of the play became a collective experience. As one stakeholder shared, “before the pandemic, we missed these special moments. Now, we have a reason to meet again—to write and rehearse the show” (27 January 2021, Giudicarie LoC online meeting, notes).

A key challenge during the co-design phase was the risk of fragmentation due to the diversity of stakeholders and multiple LoCs across different sites. To address this, stakeholders proposed discussions around common elements to unify the various festival venues and foster cohesion. These discussions led to the idea of symbolic elements like a common color, design features, and festive elements. Focusing on these unifying elements helped strengthen collaboration among the three festival sites.

Rituals were embedded in the festival design to foster mutual responsibility, connection, and care. Upon arriving at each basecamp, participants passed through an arch and received a kit with a yellow orientation map and bracelet. They signed a register, confirming they had no COVID-19 symptoms and agreed to leave if they felt unwell. Their temperature was checked, and they were required to wear masks during certain activities. These measures created a sense of shared responsibility among all involved for everyone’ safety and health. The repetition of the same rituals and activities across the three festival stops strengthened the connection among stakeholders and among festival sites. For example, the closing ceremony involved passing the flag to the local team of the next festival stop, symbolizing continuity and shared responsibility. This underscores the role of symbols and rituality in cultivating a sense of identity and belonging, reinforcing the interconnectedness of stakeholders across festival sites and the meaning of their shared endeavor (Picard 2016).

The COVID-19 pandemic presented challenges that made the collective endeavor even more meaningful. Stakeholders felt connected to the project as it reflected their values and motivated them to collaborate, in a time where the prevailing discourses focused around crisis and loss. The intensity and emotions involved in organizing the festival, including resolving last-minute issues related to the constantly changing COVID-19 situation, brought stakeholders together. This contributed to a sense of collective utopia that everyone had co-designed and contributed to. LoC members expressed their amazement at what they had achieved together: “We made it! I couldn’t believe we were able to do it together!” 23 May 2021, closing ceremony in Giudicarie, notes).

DISCUSSION

Our paper summarizes a process of co-creating a rural festival, empowering commoning initiatives, and valorizing place-based knowledge and practices. We reflect on the results through the lens of transdisciplinary literature. We also propose future implications for transformative sustainability science. Finally, we highlight the challenges and limitations of our case study.

Festival co-creation as a way for enhancing transdisciplinary collaborations and knowledge production

Reflecting on the festival’s co-creation process using the four criteria of relevance, credibility, legitimacy, and effectiveness, typical of TD collaborations (Cash et al. 2002), we can affirm that it was a successful endeavor. The festival effectively achieved its goals of making commoning initiatives visible, connecting them, and enabling collective care. Our findings demonstrate that the activities fostered networking, trust, and collaboration, allowing diverse voices and perspectives to co-exist (Tobias et al. 2019). In the long run, these connections can potentially generate greater political power to challenge dominant discourses that resist deep social-ecological transformations (Pandey et al. 2024). Regarding relevance, credibility, and legitimacy, the early co-design phase valorized the knowledge and know-how of commoning practices. The festival allowed initiatives to communicate their core values, generating a strong sense of belonging, and engaging new people usually excluded from their network (Edensor 2012, Perry et al. 2020). The co-created outputs highlighted the relational aspect of commoning as a key driver of community well-being. This emphasized collective care rather than solely focusing on material resources and management (Nieto Romero et al. 2019).

Through the case illustrated, we add to the existing evidence on the importance of co-design. The latter was crucial for enhancing the breadth and depth of the TD collaboration (Moser 2016), fostering interest and capacity to participate (Lang et al. 2012), improving relationships between researchers and stakeholders, and generating knowledge that informed all aspects of the festival co-creation process. Our findings align with Moser’s assertion that co-design should not be viewed as preliminary or preparatory, but as “highly productive work” (Moser 2016:111). It fostered mutual trust between researchers and local stakeholders and inspired new enthusiasm and novel perspectives on the theme being studied and practiced.

Results indicate that the experiential activities, including arts-based performances, PA workshops, and walks, served as boundary objects that facilitated communication and cooperation (Tobias et al. 2019). The diverse expertise and knowledge systems that collectively co-created the event blurred and transcended disciplinary boundaries, creating something new and richer than the sum of its parts (Holzer et al. 2018, Helfrich and Bollier 2019). Accounts from symposia, workshops, and other dialogue opportunities demonstrate how the chosen formats facilitated the development of ideas with real-world applications for stakeholders and participants (Tobias et al. 2019). These interactions also fostered new awareness and reflexivity (Horcea-Milcu et al. 2024) concerning commoning practices within the case study area. This included the identification of strengths, such as the recognition of the place’s value and ongoing collective processes through diverse perspectives, blind spots, such as a re-evaluation of the factors contributing to limited community participation in commoning initiatives, and potential areas for development, such as the adoption of successful community entrepreneurship practices from other contexts.

The promise of arts- and place-based events for transformative transdisciplinary research

Our findings establish festivals, and arts- and place-based events more in general, as part of the suite of methods for meaningful TD collaboration and for effective knowledge co-production. As the concept of community-based natural resource management remains a core focus of social-ecological research, the need for tools that can elevate marginalized perspectives and valorize local knowledge systems, becomes increasingly vital (Turnhout 2024). Our findings highlight how the festival differentiates itself from other forms of participatory engagement because of its special features. These features should be further explored and leveraged for transdisciplinary and transformative sustainability science (Horcea-Milcu et al. 2024).

As a unique event in place and time, the festival co-creation generated momentum and commitment, catalyzing the energy and capacities of diverse professionals from various sectors and fields of action (Edensor 2012). United by a common mission, yet grounded in their specific expertise, they worked together to create an event that was attractive to the wider public. The festival became a collector of activities that celebrated the plurality and beauty of diverse knowledge and crafts (Tschakert et al. 2016). The multiple ways of expression, listening, debating required by a creative event allowed this multifaceted knowledge to emerge. By incorporating arts-based and performative activities, the festival enhanced its capacity to be “emotionally evocative, captivating, aesthetically powerful, facilitating empathic experience, active engagement and wider understanding” (Heras and Tabara 2014:382). Growing literature believes that for science to impact society, it must instill fun and pleasure in what might seem abstract or distant (Pearson et al. 2018). The potential of arts to create meaning and to encode complex concepts is increasingly acknowledged (Belfiore 2022) but should be further explored by the literature.

The festival was primarily a celebratory and liminal event designed to showcase and share place-based practices and values that might otherwise be overlooked by the wider public (Picard 2016). Many participatory activities fail to reach beyond those directly involved (Reason and Bradbury 2008). On the contrary, in our case, besides the 33 stakeholders involved in the co-creation process, the festival reached a significant number of people (i.e., an average of 150 people took part in each of the festival stops), despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the positive experience of the festival was leveraged by stakeholders involved in this transdisciplinary research to engage more community members in dialogue about possible ways forward for the commoning initiatives. This, in turn, created the trust and networks for two co-authors of this paper to continue conducting transdisciplinary research on commoning initiatives. Further research could analyze how such festive events can maximize the feasibility and impact of research, with particular reference to their capacity to generate momentum for and acceptance of PAR activities.

Thanks to meaningful design, what could have been limitations related to COVID, for another type of participatory activity, e.g., respecting physical distancing measures, became an opportunity in the festival setting. In fact, to maintain the safety and health of participants, the festival was conducted outdoors and embedded in the rural landscape, thus strengthening connection with the context and its non-human elements.

The festival created an opportunity to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Knowledge was shared and co-produced through lived experiences and practical actions, mobilizing and making visible the intrinsic wisdom embodied in people and places (Hakkarainen et al. 2022). Guiding values and normative orientations were embedded in the festival activities. Care-related values, such as responsibility and attentiveness, were not presented as a prescriptive abstract dogma, but rather practiced and experimented with through accessible concrete actions (Moriggi et al. 2020) such as bread making, music in nature, herb collecting, and even temperature checks upon arrival at the festival venue. For instance, temperature checks fostered a sense of responsibility for the collective health of participants, while bread making and music in and with nature strengthened feelings of togetherness and attentiveness to both humans and non-humans (e.g., bacteria in the case of bread, and frogs in the case of music). This provided a tangible manifestation of the centrality of care-related values, crucial for sustainability transformations, and yet “deeply entangled in a web of material culture, collective behaviors, traditions, and social institutions” (Manfredo et al. 2017:775). The co-created activities facilitated the activation of a plurality of values that align with the multiple meanings of human well-being, of a good quality of life, and with concerns for the well-being of other beings (Horcea-Milcu et al. 2019). Our findings align with place-based literature in confirming that human life is inseparable from places we are embedded in, even in a globalized and digitalized world. Through the festival, places and their ecosystems were not passive backdrops but active stakeholders that connected experiences and meanings both spatially and temporally (Seamon 2018).

Challenges and limitations

Despite their aspirational goals, transdisciplinary processes often face significant limitations. A highly cited review by Lang et al. (2012) identifies 12 challenges, including design issues (e.g., insufficient problem framing and unbalanced ownership), process challenges (e.g., conflicting methodologies and discontinuous participation), and outcome-related issues (e.g., vagueness and ambiguity of results and difficulty in tracking scientific and societal impacts).

We have highlighted how early co-design and methodological innovations helped us overcome typical challenges of transdisciplinary work. Our results show that prior cooperation among researchers and key actors from selected commoning initiatives facilitated trust-building and understanding. These key actors were also involved in co-writing the project proposal to gain the necessary funding. Although this empowered certain stakeholders, it may have created an unbalanced problem of ownership between different groups of stakeholders (Lang et al. 2012). As demonstrated by the literature on co-design (Moser 2016), finding a common language can be challenging. For example, the core group’s focus on innovative practices, and the choice of the words “collective practices of care” and commoning initiatives as unifying terms for all initiatives involved, may have discouraged those with more traditional views on commons to actively participate. Our findings show how early co-design can be a double-edged sword, potentially exacerbating path dependencies in terms of reproducing the differentiation between more innovative and more traditional collective practices of care. Moreover, intentional and meaningful design can create specificities that may not appeal to everyone, leading outsiders to question the team’s legitimacy (Lang et al. 2012). This challenges the idealized view that transformative research must always be inclusive in absolute terms. Meaningful engagement with specific marginalized innovative commoning practices may require a degree of exclusivity toward those who resist innovation. This highlights the inherently political nature of research, in the act of choosing the entry point and the focus of the inquiry (Euler 2018, Nieto Romero et al. 2019).

The festive atmosphere of the festival also presented caveats in certain moments. The celebratory nature of the event was accompanied by a fear of failure (Lang et al. 2012) and a desire to avoid disappointing others. This inhibited potential conflicts or disagreements among stakeholders and participants. As one participant stated during a walk, “I didn’t ask about the potential negative impacts of hosting tourists in this wild valley because I didn’t want to ruin the atmosphere” (22 May 2021, walk, notes). Stakeholders had diverse expectations and standards of success (Lang et al 2012), which were not always expressed. The pressure to overperform, because of the limited-time and non-continuous nature of the festival, contributed to masking stakeholders’ fatigue. Although the co-creation process fostered enthusiasm and motivation, it was also highly demanding, especially given the concurrent demands of ordinary life. Fatigue hindered the production of outputs from our researchers’ part after the festival. For example, the manifesto remained a draft. In September 2021, an artist and researcher who participated in the festival organized a Rural Commons Assembly, inviting the commoning initiatives that were engaged in the festival co-creation. This assembly served as a safe space for commoning initiatives to reflect and exchange ideas on long-term collaborations. This following meeting highlighted the need for ongoing internal exchanges in a less performative setting than the festival, showing the importance of continuous evaluation (Zscheischler et al. 2018).

A common challenge in transdisciplinary processes is the practice-oriented nature of the collaboration (Lang et al. 2012), which can lead to a loss of analytical clarity and theoretical depth. By prioritizing action over definition and conceptualization, we partially neglected our roles as researchers and knowledge brokers. Potential disagreements regarding the conceptual foundations of the festival were set aside. On a similar note, creative outputs generated during the festival activities, such as images, narratives, or performed metaphors, served as boundary objects. However, we acknowledge that their interpretive flexibility could also lead to vague and ambiguous results, only partially replicable in other contexts (Lang et al. 2012).

CONCLUSIONS

In this paper we illustrate a process of collectively co-creating a rural festival with and for commoning practices in three mountainous rural valleys of the Italian North-Eastern Alps. By leveraging a wide range of stakeholders from cultural, sports, culinary, and crafts sectors, we demonstrate how combining expertise from various fields can result in tangible transformations in both activity design and space revitalization, ultimately enhancing the festival’s collective impact.

Early co-design and meaningful integration of diverse knowledge systems enabled the festival to connect all involved to the lived experiences of commoning. Utilizing the language of architecture, crafts, and design, the process successfully created a space for connection, visibility of marginalized practices, and fostering a sense of collective care for people and place during a time of vulnerability due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results also highlight challenges and limitations of such events. These include avoiding path dependencies in researcher-stakeholder collaborations, balancing practice orientation with theoretical depth, combining celebration and pleasure with conflict and disagreement, and mitigating stakeholders’ fatigue.

Amidst pessimistic narratives about the future of rural areas in Europe and beyond, we present an illustrative example of how co-creating plural and care-focused futures can challenge dominant discourses and inject new energy into small communities. By engaging multiple actors in an informal and generative event, the festival’s outputs demonstrate how bottom-up initiatives, like commoning practices, can foster a fertile ground of reflection and engagement, a fundamental precondition to cope with the biodiversity and environmental crises. The festival served as a “resonance chamber” for showcasing the added values of commoning practices, becoming an integral part of participants’ lived experiences through creative collaboration. We hope that our insights can foster continued reflection on the expectations and ethical obligations associated with TD collaboration, and can inspire further experimentation with arts- and place-based methods for transformative sustainability research.

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