Ruling the Commons. Introducing a new methodology for the analysis of historical commons

Abstract

Despite significant progress in recent years, the evolution of commons over the long run remains an under-explored area. During the last years an international team of historians has worked under the umbrella of the Common Rules Project in order to design and test a new methodology aimed at advancing our knowledge on the dynamics of institutions for collective action -in particular commons. This project aims to contribute to the current debates in three different fronts. Theoretically, it explicitly draws the attention to change and adaptation in the commons -contrasting with more static analyses. Empirically, it highlights the value of historical records as a rich source of information for longitudinal analysis of the functioning of commons. Methodologically, it develops a systematic way of analyzing and comparing commons' regulations across regions and time, setting a number of variables that have been defined on the basis of the "most common denominators" in commons' regulations across countries and time periods. In this paper we introduce the project, describe our sources and methodology, and present the preliminary results of our analysis.

Shared Patterns in Long-Term Dynamics of Commons as Institutions for Collective Action

“…Moreover, an extensive coding system was used to allow in-depth analysis of the regulatory activities and accompanying sanctioning (De Moor et al 2016). Having transcribed and scrutinized the available written sources, text parts containing actual decisions and/or rules were distilled from the text and translated into modern-day English.…”

“…In particular, changes of a permissive or prohibitive nature often also included a sanction for those infringing a rule. The sanctions related to these regulatory activities were also recorded in the Sanctioning-part of the database and linked to the regulatory activity they belonged to (De Moor et al 2016).…”

“…We present a quantitative analysis of eighteen European commons in two countries across seven centuries offering a unique picture of long-term institutional dynamics. The analysis relies on the database recently built as part of the Common Rules Project (De Moor et al 2016). This database includes detailed formal rules that were developed and registered to facilitate the functioning of commons, including their changes across several centuries.…”

“…In other words, the field lacks a serious longitudinal perspective, whereas now only a static picture of the functioning of institutions is usually provided. Only recently, attempts have been made to empirically understand the dynamics of institutional change within a commons setting in the longer run (De Moor 2015;De Moor et al 2016).…”

Epistemic Regards on Food as a Commons: Plurality of Schools, Genealogy of Meanings, Confusing Vocabularies

“…The different academic epistemologies (schools of thought) that theorized the commons have come up with multiple meanings for the same term and different normative valuations for similar resources. Since the commons are becoming a relevant academic and political topic in the last two decades (Berkes et al, 1989;Van Laerhoven and Ostrom, 2007;De Moor et al, 2016), these discrepancies among different academic epistemologies, and between the academic and non-academic constituencies, become politically relevant, since how to define what a commons is and how food can be valued are subjects of political debates.…”