1 - Introduction

Summary

How do we motivate the busy urbanite to care about melting glaciers half a world away? In a classroom in Pennsylvania, a teacher and his class begin interacting, online, with other students and teachers in Asia and Africa. Hearing from a teacher in Nepal about problems with glacial melt in their community, the issue of melting glaciers suddenly become immensely important to them. This phenomenon, of a change in individual orientation to connectedness, is what is referred to as relationality. Through empathy and perspective-taking, people are moved to other-regarding action in ways not considered by the literature on collective action and the commons. The book is a necessary addendum to Ostroms tome, Governing the Commons, and presents a new, relational, model of collective action and begins to imagine its implications for real-world institutions.