Historical landed commons in Greece: a governance system at risk on Astypalaia Island

Abstract

Τhe paper analyses an insular community, Astypalaia in the Aegean Sea, which hosts a distinct commons institution that has acted as a governance catalyst. It has so far safeguarded the delicate balance between the development of supplementary subsistence activities (agricultural, pastoral, fisheries, and food processing-supply), community building, fair distribution, and management of landed resources, and overall landscape justice. This article unfolds the critical factors that have fostered or restrained the longevity of this Landed Commons (LCs) and reveals the emerging risks from both exogenous (international and nationwide dynamics) and endogenous (organisational structures and governance capacity) agents. The case of Astypalaia is placed within the broader debate on the role of commons in local communities, leading to significant insights into how this LCs can be revalorised by the host community establishing renewed stewardship within current socio-economic trajectories.

Land Policy in Resilience Building: The Case of the Evros River Basin in Northern Greece

“…Land policy is defined as the whole complex of socioeconomic and legal prescriptions that dictate how land and use/access rights, are allocated, re-distributed and safeguarded (UN/ECE 1996). It constitutes an institutional-policy domain servicing a dual purpose by providing: (i) a wide range of tools that can contribute to state and social action for the control and management of landed assets (Delladetsimas et al 2019) and (ii) a basis for interaction of various policy domains, including risk prevention and mitigation in all aspects of spatial development. The composing tools of land policy comprise cadastres, land information systems (comprising information regarding land uses, real-estate values, use and development rights etc.…”