Abstract
In mountain social-ecological systems, the values ascribed to both material and immaterial goods undergo evolution in response to the restructuring of relationships among humans and between humans and their habitats. However, the rules governing land and resource management at the community level remain static and resistant to change. This contribution delves into the incongruity between evolving values and the unyielding rules governing historical commons. This incongruity results in dysfunctionality of local resource governance, manifested through unsustainable resource exploitation by external interests and low community participation in collective efforts.
Abundant scholarship claims that commons serve as empowering forms of land and resource management, enhancing community well-being and preserving resource integrity. Drawing on this, this contribution explores the repurposing processes of historical commons through community-based entrepreneurship. The objective of such processes is to align values with resource uses and stimulate collective action for transforming the relationship between humanity and natural resources. We focus on a case study in the in the Northeastern Italian Alps: a community-based hospitality that aims to repurposing a community-owned mountain huts as a strategy to counteract periphery traps. The latter includes the exploitation of lands for EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies, and the transformation of the region into a transport corridor between prominent tourist destinations. The initiative was included as a demonstrative case of COST Action MARGISTAR, a project assessing current problems, alternative viable future visions, and pathways to post-marginalised mountain areas.
To comprehensively study reconfiguring processes, a formative evaluation framework, based on a previous EU-funded project (SIMRA), is employed in this research. The framework identifies enabling and disenabling factors in repurposing processes and assesses resulting trade-offs. The research adopts a semi-grounded approach, integrating literature on innovation processes in community-based resource management with empirical data gathered by the first author.
The article's contribution lies in empirically testing the framework through a longitudinal case study of the community-based hospitality initiative. The contribution will provide insights into observed processes, articulating a set of indicators to be used by practitioners, policymakers, and researchers to evaluate innovation processes involving commons that project such local forms of natural resource governance in the future. The findings contribute to the broader discourse on social innovation, addressing the imperative of inclusive collective action and providing practical guidance for similar initiatives that enable to project historical commons in the future as transformative practices for sustainable governance of resources to maintain a good life on earth for all.