Elements of the institutionalization process of the forest and pasture commons in Romania as particular forms of social economy

Abstract

In Romania, the study of jointly owned property (devălmășie) has been of great interest for social scientists during the different political regimes of the country. After the fall of the communist regime and after over 50 years of state ownership, the forests and pasture commons (obști and composeorate) returned to be private property of newly established associative forms. This paper aims to identify and define the contemporary Romanian commons by reference to the general characteristics of social economy organizations. In order to achieve this and obtain a clearer view of the place of the commons in Romania's organizational environment, presentation of some elements of the commons’ institutionalization process after the fall of the communist regime is included. The data used for answering these two objectives comes from the analysis of a database comprising 328 questionnaires applied to board members of commons in Romania and various legal documents. The main argument of the paper is that the restitution process that led to the re‐establishment of the Romanian commons from public property to common private property—marked by hardships, conflicts, misunderstandings or faults—deepened the scarce knowledge of the political actors, general public and other stakeholders in regard to these organizations and perpetuated their unclear position in the organizational field.

Commons as Traditional Means of Sustainably Managing Forests and Pastures in Olt Land (Romania)

“…In non-equalitarian commons the rights are granted only to the heirs of those who have participated in establishing the associative structure [16]. In all commons the property is indivisible and the members cannot precisely locate their shares or sell them to non-members [13,17]. The commons have their own legally registered by-laws.…”

“…The Romanian commons can be considered social economy organizations (Petrescu and Stănilă, 2013;Opincaru, 2017; [14,16,17]. However, such a taxonomy is not fully justified since, as Nyssens and Petrella [18] have shown, the commons pursue the interests of a defined group, while social economy organizations serve the general interest of society as a whole.…”

“…The normative act of 1904 assigned the following responsibilities to the assembly: (a) the certification and confirmation of the statute of the co-owners and the elect, the amendment of the by-law, the appointment or dismissal of the President or of other elected people; (b) the validation of compossessorate development strategy and annual activity plans in order to capitalize on the resources of commonly owned forest; (c) the guarantee that the forests are constructively exploited for the maximum benefit; (d) the balanced allocation of compossessorate income and expenditure by ensuring sufficient resources and rigorous accounting for expenditures; and (e) the permanent fulfilment of duties assigned to elected members through their status within the hierarchical organization of compossessorates [23] (pp. [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19].…”

“…The title is in their name. Their members know their rights, including the number of votes they are entitled to during the general assembly, but they do not exactly know where their shares of land are [13,17]. Members' rights come from and are proportional with their elders' rights.…”

“…Commons membership provides grazing rights in the commons land, entitlement to a quota of firewood and financial benefits, such as dividends resulting from the transfer of felling rights, subsidies for pastures and, in the case of powerful commons, ventures and capitalization on berries [8,12,17]. The commons support the development of local communities [14,17] and local entrepreneurs [22].…”