Abstract
Because of the megatrend of tertiarization and consequent more off-farm activities, most people in European Alps do not live anymore on self-sufficiency, extracting resource units from the ecological system for self-sustainment. Resources such as forests, pastures, traditionally managed in commons systems, become increasingly important for the natural and cultural ecosystems they provide and as renewable energy sources, and thus become interesting beyond the community that owns collective property rights over them. The increasing scale of the resource dependency determines the creation of a common pool situation not anymore within the commoners, but among scales and land uses. It is becoming a commons in a multilevel world, which has been well studied as a complex and polycentric systems problem. Thus, a new balance must be found between local sustainment and ecosystem services provision as a public good. In the framework of a multilevel, polycentric governance constellation, forms of community-based resource management are important for stewarding at local scale the resource in a sustainable way, especially when the resource is prone to abandonment or to over-exploitation. The study follows Ostrom´s principle that norms should change as context conditions change, and thus institutional change in a commons should happen in response to changing conditions in the community. Although considering that community-based resource management is composed of social and ecological elements, the article focuses on the social element. Using a systems thinking approach and dynamic modelling, the article addresses the objective of exploring which institutional changes and policies are more appropriate to guarantee the continuation of the community stewarding the collective resource.