Forest commons, traditional community ownership and ecological consequences: Insights from Spain

The The handwriting of society on the landscape: modeling of the Environmental Changes on the Borders of Protected Areas located in the Espinhaço Mountain Range, state of Minas Gerais, Brazil

“…Even with the impossibility of opening new areas for cultivation and with the need to keep previously cleared land in cultivation, the trends in landscape use remained practically unchanged. Guadilla-Sáez et al (2020) obtained results that follow the same logic, observing the effect of replacing traditional community governance in an area of common use in Spain: state intervention destabilized a management system that had worked well since the Middle Ages. Management that involves traditional communities, using local solutions, is more likely to solve conflicts around PAs (Branco et al, 2020).…”

“…These relationships can be studied by field research aimed at understanding local activities in the day-to-day life of communities that use natural resources (GALIZONI, 2000;RIBEIRO et al, 2005). Studies such as Guadilla-Sáez et al (2020) and Brugger et al (2016) allow us to understand how local communities use available resources over the span of centuries.…”

Forests in common: Learning from diversity of community forest arrangements in Europe

“…In Portugal, traditional commons known as baldios were afforested by the State, but returned to local government ownership in 1974, with mixed results (Skulska et al 2020 ). In Spain, by the late eighteenth century, politics did not recognise community ownership as a form of property, and forest commons were privatised with resulting loss of forest (Guadilla-Sáez et al 2020 ). While ancient modes of common forest management persist, and new ones emerge across Europe, in places they are also neglected or overlooked.…”

Privately owned forests and woodlands in Spain: Changing resilience strategies towards a forest-based bioeconomy

“…At present, forest management is governed by Law 15/2006, dated 28 December, on the Woodland of Aragon and later amendments. However, although there is a great need for a Forest Plan for Aragon, it has not yet been completed (currently in progress) as it is extremely complex (Aragonese Government, 2018 a), due to the considerable fragmentation of private woodland and property, unknown owners and even some legal loopholes and administrative complexity arising from the process of replacing traditional Spanish community ownership by other forms of land ownership (Guadilla et al, 2020;Karrera Egialde, 2010;Aragonese Government, 2016) (Technical Annex, figure 2).…”