Welcome to IASC’s XVIth Biennial Conference in Utrecht in 2017! The ‘Institutions for Collective Action’ research team of Utrecht University as well as the researchers affiliated with Utrecht University’sStrategic Theme ‘Institutions for Open Societies’ are proud to jointly host the global XVI Biennial Conference, ‘Practicing the commons: Self-governance, cooperation, and institutional change’ of The International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) in the historical city centre of Utrecht, 10-14 July 2017.

The conference is expected to attract over 600 participants from all over the world: academics, practitioners, and others interested in the field of commons, common-pool resources, and cooperatives.

The IASC is the world’s leading professional organization for the interdisciplinary study of commons, common-pool resources, and other resources that are (or could be) held or used collectively by communities, both in developing and developed countries. The association is devoted to understanding and improving institutions for the management and governance of such resources. The IASC is open to both academic scholars as well as expert practitioners, and hence has become the (non-profit) association par excellencefor the mutual exchange between scholars and practitioners on commons’ issues.

The 2017 Biennial IASC-Conference will be an excellent opportunity for scholars and practitioners from all over the world to meet each other, to learn from each other’s research and experiences, to exchange ideas, and to learn from successful examples of management and governance of common-pool resources. The conference will focus on examples from all over the world, but will also pay much attention on the significant current-day developments on common-pool resources and cooperatives within the Netherlands (such as knowledge commons, energy cooperatives, care cooperatives, urban commons, and other citizens’ initiatives), not only by inviting representatives of those Dutch initiatives to join as conference participants, but also by offering them an opportunity to draw attention to their initiatives, e.g. by organizing public events and field-trips.

Both the hosting team and the IASC are confident the impact of this conference will not only be beneficial to the conference partners involved, but also to citizens’ initiatives and other forms of commons and self-governance within the Netherlands.