Hacking Our Common Future: Transnational cooperation between community-led initiatives in a fragmented world
The conference will take place from the 4th to 6th of November 2026 at the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (Iscte) in Lisbon, Portugal.
This year’s theme is “Hacking Our Common Future: Transnational cooperation between community-led initiatives in a fragmented world“. The full Call for Contribution description with submission guidelines is here.
Hacking our Common Future is an invitation to engage collectively in the unfinished work of recomposing economies, institutions, and ways of life – across borders and differences – through experimentation, cooperation, and shared responsibility for the worlds we are already inhabiting and transforming.
Building on the 5th edition’s focus on Collapse and Regeneration, this conference shifts attention to what comes next: the active, collective, and experimental shaping of common futures under conditions of uncertainty, contradiction, and re-colonization, driven by predatory claims over natural resources, as well as securitarian discourses justifying territorial expansion and appropriation.
This conference provides a unique opportunity to exchange on transnational cooperation between community-led initiatives (CLIs) promoting grassroots resistance against such re-colonization, as well as on the structural and institutional conditions for the development of grassroots-led emancipatory alternatives.
We continue to face profound ecological disruption and an encroaching digital colonization of our everyday lives, which contribute to widening inequalities, political polarization, digital enclosure, armed conflicts, and the fragmentation of global cooperation frameworks. At the same time, new and old forms of CLIs are increasingly engaging in practices that do not merely repair damaged systems, but repurpose, recombine, and reimagine them. These initiatives operate across territories, cultures, and epistemologies, often outside or alongside formal institutions, generating new forms of social learning, governance, and economic organization.
From regeneration to hacking
The notion of hacking is used here not as rupture, but as a response to the limits of the sustainability and regenerative paradigms to promote truly effective responses under current conditions. It refers to situated collective practices that creatively appropriate existing infrastructures – economic, cultural, technological, and institutional – in order to redirect them toward common goods. Hacking implies experimentation, play, conflict, care, and coordination; it is a way of engaging with reality that neither fully rejects inherited structures nor passively reproduces them.
The move from regeneration to hacking can be read as part of a longer trajectory in which sustainability and regenerative paradigms are increasingly questioned for their capacity to respond to fragmentation, uncertainty, and growing institutional fatigue. Rather than reviving the promise of global planning for the common good, this call foregrounds collective reappropriation as a way of engaging with common futures under conditions of asymmetrical plurality.
As an analytical lens, the conference draws on emerging paradigms,, which depict and explain how CLIs can react to ‘paradoxical conditions’, sustain hope without denying complexity, and engage pragmatically with contradicting forces beyond their paradigmatic world-views instead of seeking final, perfect or universal solutions.
Albeit, the ultimate goal of redesigning a new architecture of societal organization to counter the challenges of our times remains at the core of a sustainable ecological and social transformation, the opportunities to drive it remain subject to context, resources and capabilities. And while our imaginaries feed on grand ideas, change in the real world starts with sustainable action within the given context along with the rules and belief-system it is grounded on. Hacking for change starts in a niche, yet, has the potential to evolve in the given ecosystem, as it becomes incorporated into the common practice and eventually engenders the advent of something new.
Community-led initiatives and transnational commoning
In a context of increasing isolationism and geopolitical fragmentation, CLIs are developing transnational forms of cooperation that bypass purely state-centered or market-driven logics. These include federated networks, platform-based cooperativism, solidarity-based digital infrastructures, and translocal alliances rooted in shared values rather than uniform identities.
Such initiatives often combine:
- cooperative and commons-based economic models and practices,
- critical engagement with digital platforms and infrastructure for data governance, including generative AI;
- relational and more-than-human perspectives on territory and livelihoods,
- cultural experimentation embedded in everyday life, including, but not limited to, artistic creation and intercultural exchange;
- renewed attention to lived experience, autonomy, and collective joy as political resources.
Rather than proposing a single pathway forward, these practices open multiple, unfinished trajectories toward common futures.
However, sustaining transnational cooperation across such plurality may require more than openness to difference, potentially involving the active construction of shared grammars that enable learning, translation and coordination without reducing diversity to uniformity.
We invite contributions addressing, among others, the following 9 thematic fields:
- Transnational cooperation and federated commons How CLIs build cross-border alliances, shared infrastructures, and cooperative ecosystems while respecting differences and local autonomy.
- Hacking digital infrastructures for the commons Critical and practical approaches to platforms, cooperative technologies, data governance, and digital tools for collective action and economic democracy.
- New political economies Emerging socio-economic practices that move beyond linear progress narratives, embracing cyclicity, contradiction, plurality, and experimentation.
- Culture, play, and everyday life as sites of transformation The role of cultural practices, aesthetic experimentation, and lived critique in reshaping values, social relations, and economic behavior.
- More-than-human commons and relational worldviews Initiatives that rethink human-nonhuman relations, land stewardship, and ecological responsibility through relational, animist, or embodied practices.
- Conflict, antagonism, and cooperation within CLIs How community-led initiatives navigate power asymmetries, internal tensions, and political disagreement without depoliticization or fragmentation.
- Knowledge, memory, and transmission Alternative pedagogies, archives, and social learning processes sustaining translocal cooperation and intergenerational continuity.
- Beyond corporate approaches to post-carbon transition The impact of CLIs on the agenda and behavior of multinational corporations, through grassroots resistance against extractivism and greenwashing, or other alternative pathways for post-carbon transition beyond the “green economy”.
- Emerging action-research methods and methodologies applied to the above sub-fields.