Abstract
In Italian mountain territories rural commons (e.g. forests, pastureland, mountain huts, irrigation systems) have been governed through collective action organizations that have historically guaranteed the balance between human productive activities and environmental protection (Granet-Abisset, 2015, Bartaletti, 2004). They have sustained rural livelihoods from subsistence agriculture to breeding and house building. This has in turn enhanced community resilience and long-term preservation of resources. The definition of commons that we use in this study refers to a governance regime, whereby a group of people holds a collective property and needs to decide collectively over the common pool resources (De Moor, 2019). Nowadays, transformative changes such as new economic models, demographic trends, climate changes and new institutional settings in mountain territories are compromising the established balance between society and natural resources (Granet-Abisset, 2015). The traditional governance system of the commons, the way they are conceived as well as the way resources are used and managed are questioned. Hence, it is relevant to identify the leverages of change and their impacts on rural commons. Moreover, it is relevant to investigate the way such governance systems can adapt and innovate to face such changes in order to guarantee sustainability of the common resources and resilience of the whole community.
Given the framing of the mountain rural commons as complex governance systems in changing mountain territories, it becomes relevant to reflect that they are subject to an increasingly relevant participation dilemma, about who is legitimized to use and govern the commons and according to which rationale. We believe that the changing role of the state, the different social composition, the economic transition and the climate change effects conditions of a specific place should be particularly taken into consideration in sustainable governance of mountain rural commons. We argue that the reframing of participation tools, the development of innovative commoning practices as well as the setting of sustainability principles in governing commons may enhance their preservation, valorization and resilience towards new societal trends. In addition, new forms of cooperation and social innovations in terms of reconfiguring networks, social practices and governance processes, can be used to further promote rural commons.
The research seeks to tackle the relation between transformative trends of the mountain territories and sustainable governance of commons. Following research questions are investigated: How do these trends/changes/leverages affect (positively and negatively) the governance of common resources and commoning practices? Which participatory approaches and commoning practices enhance sustainability in the governance of commons?
The authors conduct a literature review on different socioeconomic theories that frame commons, commoning practices and in general forms of participation in the governance of commons. The selected theories relate to the relevance of social capital (Putnam, 1995, Fukuyama, 1996) and a system of individual and collective utilities (Cox, 2019, De Moor 2019) as prerequisites of collaborative participatory managing of the commons and to the “commoning” (Euler, 2018) as the resulting practice. Moreover, concrete insights have been collected from an expert workshop and from explorative interviews on the traditional and new types of organizations that are managing the common pool resources in the selected study region of Trentino-Alto Adige and Veneto. The results draw a synthesis of the reviewed literature and some further insights to the research questions on the base of the empirical evidence in the selected study region.
https://event.unitn.it/cucs2019/