Toward an Integrated History to Govern the Commons: Using the Archive to Enhance Local Knowledge

Abstract

Communities that have used common-pool resources (CPRs) for generations often preserve a valuable 'institutional memory'. It can be understood as a subset of local knowledge concerning strategies, norms, and rules used by the community to deal with CPR problems (e.g. overexploitation) in different time periods. Scholars have argued that institutional memory is useful in two aspects of CPR governance: as focal point to encourage users to sustain and to undertake collective action, and as support knowledge to design new policies. However, institutional memory is constrained by personal and social memories, and therefore it must be considered not as fully cumulative but subject to a steady process of adjustment according to experience. When communities have recorded their regulations in writing, e.g. in village bylaws, it is possible to undertake a learning process to recover and take advantage of their institutional memory. One way is to carry out participatory workshops to compare the historical and presentday bylaws of the community. However, the comparison of these sources is not an easy task, because, on the one hand, they constitute a large body of rules and, on the other, they have been designed using different epistemologies (e.g. concrete vs. abstract) and linguistic forms (e.g. early modern vs. contemporary grammars). In this paper we use an approach based on the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework to compare the historical and presentday bylaws of a community located in Cantabria (Spain). The utility of the IAD framework is verified. It enables one not only to undertake a systematic comparison of the bylaws, but also to easily display the results in participatory workshops. The use of the archive as a source of local information to enhance users' knowledge is an uncommon procedure among CPR scholars and practitioners, and therefore we dedicate a specific section of the paper to discussing this utility.

Reimagining modern politics in the European mountains: confronting the traditional commons with the neo-rural conception of the common good

“…This urban idealization of the commons ran into a context defined by two ideological views in permanent tension: (a) the traditional approach to the commons and (b) the legal framework provided by the modern state that dismantled (or marginalized) the historical legal framework that had been generated by the traditional commons (Vaccaro & Beltran, 2019;Vázquez, 2020). In practice, however, a sort of legal pluralism consolidated as the national legal framework was clear, but in many municipalities containing several villages, the local lands were in fact managed by local boards that followed some of the traditional norms (Merry, 2017).…”